Online Learning Communities
Primary schools have leveraged the power of communities to enrich and improve the educational activities students undertake for years
. Teachers and other school representatives work hard to involve parents, grandparents and other local community members in learning activities both inside and outside the classroom. Parents may serve as class parents; grandparents are invited to various educational activities at the school, while some schools allow non-parents a role in creating and running extracurricular educational activities. Recent technological developments accelerate this process and make possible the creation of virtual communities encompassing the entire wired world. Web 2.0 has been largely responsible for this progression and the results can provide dramatic enhancement of classroom learning activities.As parents and teachers explore new technologies as sources of educational activities for classrooms or individual students, they may experience difficulty locating the resources they need to accomplish their goals. In searching for appropriate learning activities online, teachers and parents need to seek out sites that groups educational activities by age and includes navigational organization to make these activities accessible. Further, they should be searching for sites that provide a vast array of learning activities across a wide swath of curriculum material. These qualities will ensure that the parents and teachers collaborate with a site that includes the best educational activities available.
However, the need goes even deeper. In some cases, the needs of a particular student or class may transcend the learning activities offered anywhere. When this occurs, the parent or teacher may feel bereft of the necessary support. Nevertheless, another option exists: find a site that offers a Web 2.0 based community of users and authors of learning activities. With authoring tools, the teacher or parent can create educational activities tailored to a specific pedagogical need. Ideally, such an authoring tool will not require any programming skills, thus opening up this function to all educators. Additionally, an even more powerful tool lies in the creation of a user community. Web 2.0 technologies enable users to gather online, share strategies, lessons and even learning activities already created. In this way, parents and teachers need not look tirelessly for educational activities to solve a stubborn classroom challenge.
By joining a Web-based community of educators, parents and teachers can seek support, guidance and actual solutions from that community. Help may come in the form of already working educational activities or suggestions on how to create more. Either way, the support can prove invaluable in supplying badly needed learning activities to address under served needs in an individual classroom or a school population. Further, teachers may use the support network embedded in a Web 2.0 user community to design and develop learning activities when encountering obstacles to a student's progress.
Gaining access to a worldwide community broadens the teacher's reach and thus the range of educational activities available to the students. Web 2.0 technologies enabling the creation of improved learning activities can enrich the classroom experience of all students.
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