Use your edtech for learning!

I met up with a friend and colleague of mine today - part catch-up, part idea-bouncing for the coming school year.  We are both planning for incorporating some more edtech into teaching and learning with our students this year - consolidating on what we started last year, and adding a couple of new tools. We took a look at a few sites created by and for teachers and students (including my own from last school year). She also lent me what is turning out to be an excellent book (Troy Hicks' 'Crafting Digital Writing') that I dove right into this afternoon at home. It's been a great day for reflection and goal-setting.

One thing that I have seen quite a bit of discussion of in social media, books and articles for teachers is the insistence on the need for students to be able to evaluate websites. I agree wholeheartedly. It is imperative that students learn to read and use online texts critically.

What concerns me is that I haven't seen a lot of discussion about the need for teachers to evaluate what they are putting up on the web for their students. So you want your class to blog? Why? Why are they blogging? What are they writing? Who are they writing for? Where is the learning? The same for class websites - is the site for students, parents, or both? What's the purpose of the site? Does the design of your site reflect this purpose? Does the content reflect the purpose?

As teaching professionals, we should have good answers to these questions - beyond 'It's trendy', 'I'm expected to' or 'That's what everyone's doing these days'.

It's a waste of your (and your audience's!) time to create content on the web that is badly designed, uninformed and lacking clear purpose and direction.

My two cents: before we start building sites, wikis and blogs for student use, we need to invest the time to learn about our chosen media and plan to use them effectively.