Thing 5

What does "School 2.0" mean to you?
It means students and teachers embrace the many means of information gathering available to us now.  The textbook and the school library are no longer the sole sources of information to students.  It also means a certain interconnectedness in which what we do at home no longer is independent of what happens at schools and things that happen in one place can be shared at another place or time.

What does it mean for schools of the future?
It's well and good to say, "I have a 21st Century Classroom," but not four, five, and six years after the fact.  Things are changing so fast that bureaucracy laden school budgets cannot keep pace with the hardware need fast enough. Sure, web code has gotten more and more robust over the years, but the basic framework for how the Internet runs is exactly the same as it was twenty years ago.  Yet the sheer amount of content we can access through this framework is increasingly more staggering.  If a school is going to make a commitment to keep pace then they need to commit to the money and training necessary to do so.  That last part is important because not every teacher is a native to Internet technology.  Many immigrants that never grew up with it, unlike today's generation of students. It isn't any use to have a classroom set of iPads if a teacher is still struggling with how to check her email.