Teaching: Classroom 2.0

I have now worked for coming up to a year with The Consultants-e team and moderated courses introducing information and communication technologies (ICT) to language teachers and other trainers. The courses I have been directly involved in ICT in the Classroom and Short course: wikis are designed to help trainers learn about these technologies and incorporate them in their teaching practice. For me it has been a wonderful experience working with trainers from all over the world, some of whom had little or no experience of working with blogs, wikis, online forums or virtual learning environments such as Moodle, and seeing them grow in confidence in using these tools and witnessing the wonderfully creative ways they have adopted (and adapted) them. Here is an introductory video produced by Graham Stanley that highlights some of the technologies that The Consultants-e team having been successfully training teachers to use:


As a side note, I was reminded of this video by visiting the Classroom 2.0 social network, which I came across while exploring the Ning, a Web 2.0 application that allows you to set up your own social network on any topic you like. And just to illustrate the power of the net, I came across Ning while reading an article Break down these walls from The Economist online, which argues that open standards, rather than closed self-contained "walled" applications (an example given being the impossibilty at the moment of transferring “your Facebook profile to MySpace, or moving a piece of clothing or furniture from (the virtual world) Second Life to Entropia Universe”) represents the bright new future of the Internet.