Now that you are familiar with all the technologies you will be using in this course this semester, you are ready to begin learning about the requirements for this course.  During the next few weeks we are together, you will be working with a client to complete a product or products for them. You will be expected to use all that you have learned in the program thus far and to incorporate what you will be learning in the readings on social media and Web 2.0 during this course to complete your project.  You will have the choice of working solo or with up to two partners, of your choosing. You may find your client or you may use one that I have secured.  Your project may be wholly completed and ready to release or it may be a work in progress.

This might seem vague and confusing - but that is because the project is a fuzzy idea that you have to actually develop and shape.  You will be expected to communicate with the client and figure out what they want as you make suggestions to improve upon what they want.  You will be responsible for completing a timeline and meeting the goals that you and the client establish.  In addition, you will be working to incorporate brain-based learning strategies into your work.

Most importantly, you will be expected to reflect upon all that you do. You should come out of the project with new information and ideas - so you will be reflecting on what you learn and how you grow.  To get an idea of the scope of the final project, please take a look at the final report that you will be expected to prepare, please click here.

Please read the articles before class on Tuesday.

• Week 2 Materials - this page
• Article from Edutopia: Science Shows Making Lessons Relevant Really Matters
• Article: Don’t Lecture Me: Rethinking How College Students Learn

The actions you need to complete this week as well as directions for each activity follow.

1) Learn about Web 2.0 tools used in education.

Your main challenge this semester is to take courses in the College of Education which already exist and develop a portion of the course that will use Social Media/Web 2.0  technologies to become more relevant to students as well as more interactive. The College of Education at UTB is embarking on a mission to prepare our future and current teachers for 21st century teaching and learning.   

The articles included in your reading provides a very strong rationale for making instruction relevant based on what has been discovered about brain science. Quite simply, if not relevant - it is not learned. So, where does Web 2.0 fit in?  What is this Web 2.0 technology that I keep talking about?  This SlideShare may help you better understand it and why so many teachers are getting on the Web 2.0 bandwagon:

So - interest piqued? I hope so - because you are going to research Web 2.0 tools, how they are currently used in education and then find a way to embed them into lessons that teachers in the College of Education already teach.  You will not become SMEs for content, but you will act in your capacity of Instructional Designers to make recommendations on how to best present content using Web 2.0 technologies. Then you will develop the instruction for this lesson. 

It is important to focus on how  and when learning occurs. The graphic below provides a focus on the activities that promote learning. While Dale's original Cone of Experience does not contain percentages (and no one can seem to agree who added the percentages), it is likely you will agree that the more involved you are in the learning process, the more you learn.

If asked, Albert Bandura would probably agree that most teachers strongly favor lecture as the predominant teaching method because they have seen it modeled over and over and over. What you are going to do is to develop instruction that uses Social Media/Web 2.0 in order to make it more interactive. The inclusion of Web 2.0 in the lesson has a two-fold purpose. The first is to model the use of technology in teaching and the second is to give students the opportunity to learn to use the technologies.

What might this look like, you ask. Let's take the assignment in which undergraduate students (future teachers) are asked to develop a lesson on the causes of the Civil War.  In this lesson, students will be writing out the lesson plan and developing supplemental materials.

For the first part of the lesson, the professor could ask students to brainstorm various ways the lesson could be taught - using Wordle to brainstorm. After the Wordle is created, students could be asked to discuss which ones were most popular and challenge them to discuss why those were listed more frequently.  Students could then be grouped and come up with their own Wordle, challenging them to come up with additional,  more creative strategies.  The simple inclusion of Wordle models one use of technology for teaching.  To further enhance learning, students may be asked to develop a timeline using one of the timeline apps available on the Internet to include in the final project.

Your development of the lesson would include a tutorial on using the selected software that either you create or you find online as well as all the resources both the professor and the students will need to successfully develop lessons. Wow - sounds easy.  But, this will be very challenging for you as you work to develop the lesson.  For those of you who are not teachers, you will be stretched possibly more. But, realize, the interactive and involved learning that I am asking you to develop is increasingly being used in higher education as well as in training. Regardless of where your future in educational technology lies, understanding how to use these new Social Media/Web 2.0 tools will put you ahead of the pack.

Not sure what tools are out there?  Believe me, there are plenty!!!!!!  Click on my Pinterest board for Social Media below to find multiple lists of lists of lists of Web 2.0 tools. From these and a search through the Web, you will find hundreds of options for Web 2.0 tools. You probably don't want to use more than three different ones in a lesson.

What are your next steps?

• Peruse the list of clients who are looking for someone to assist them in developing some type of content - most likely online.  If you find something that looks interesting, then add your name.  You also have the option of finding your own client or developing your own project.  If you are going for the second option, please add client's name in the chart.   Go here for list of clients and projects:  Client list and descriptions of projects 
• Contact the client for an initial interview, establish methods of communication, get a summary of the client's expectations about what you are to do. Contact information found here: client list and descriptions of projects 
• Create a page for your project on your wiki or blog and create an outline or table that covers all the and post a table that will contain this information.  The following pages can be used as a template or you can set up a page to house your projects in a way that makes sense to you.   Project page example
• Link the project page to your course wiki page. 
• Begin working on a tentative timeline for the semester.

We will meet in Collaborate so that we can discuss your project and what needs to be done.