The most important
rationale for a focus on classroom collaboration stems from the notion embedded
in Response to Intervention theory that all students should receive
differentiated instruction at Tier I.
Without this foundation, a school’s entire framework cannot hope to
support the diverse learning needs of any student population whether it’s
Dripping Springs ISD or Port Arthur ISD.
Collaboration is one of the absolute surest ways to ensure that one’s classroom
instruction will be differentiated in such a way that each student can rise
upon his or her strengths and rely on his or her colleagues’ strengths to take
the whole group further than any one of them could have gone on their own.
Web 2.0 and
similar technologies allow us to avail ourselves of the opportunity to reach
out from home to home, school to school, city to city, and even nation to
nation as we teach our students (and our teachers) that these tools are
available, often for free, and can be leveraged to multiply the opportunities our
students have to collaborate with others whose strengths will compliment their
own.
Like anything that
exists within the world of the Internet, however, Web 2.0 tools are myriad, and
it becomes difficult to keep up with the new while trying to find and then
master that which grows old within days or weeks rather than months or
years. This is where curators come
in. According to Rosenbaum (2012), “Curation
is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find,
contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update
regarding what's interesting, happening, and cool in their focus. Curators tend
to have a unique and consistent point of view--providing a reliable context for
the content that they discover and organize.”
He mentions sites like Pinterest, Flickr, and Tumblr as websites that
allow users to specialize in or curate a chosen field of interest (Rosenblaum,
2012). Thus, curators help the rest of
us find a more organized well of tools and information from which to choose. And, of course, many individuals use Web 2.0
tools to curate Web 2.0 tools themselves.
LiveBinders, one
such Web 2.0 tool, has created a way for people to collaborate, curate, and
present information that lends itself especially to the field of education.
From sharing resources in a professional development session to creating data
packets for students to research, study, or even contribute, LiveBinders allows
a user to create a virtual binder that can contain anything from editable
documents to .pdf documents to Internet links to graphics. Teachers could conceivably set up a binder
filled with information that is difficult to print or display and have students
answer questions about the material, discuss it with their classmates, or use
the material to collaborate on a related project of their own. Teacher leaders could create a binder filled
with content area resources, classroom management tools and/or information,
research, and any other thing that anyone has put on the Internet for all of us
to share. Finally, administrators could
use LiveBinders to collate material about their campus; to collaborate with
administrators throughout the region, the country, and the world; and to keep
an organized collection of useful information, research in response to their reflections,
and projects on which they intend to follow up.
It is easy to see
that these tools unleash a monumental amount of power and possibility. Maybe
enough to make FableVision’s (2011) silly cartoon about the flying soap box
racer make a little bit of sense. Now we
just need to get our profession over its fear of reaching out from the
chalkboards and paper gradebooks in which so much of it is mired and look
forward to the possibilities this technology offers.
Reference
FableVision.
(2011, July 27). Above and beyond [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KMM387HNQk
Rosenbaum,
S. (2012, April). Content curators are the new superheros of the web. Fast Company. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/1834177/content-curators-are-new-superheros-web
