SAS Educational Programs

I spend about three to four hours each week learning online with our
students. I should actually say I’m learning from our students
just like they’re learning from each other. I thought it would be
a good way to give our community some feedback about the expanding
learning opportunities SAS is providing by highlighting some of the
things being written and shared by our students, our teachers and our
administrators on a regular basis.

The creative process involved in producing online content goes to
the heart of the Web 2.0 learning movement sweeping the educational
world. According to 2020systems, an online marketing and consulting
firm dealing with new and emerging technologies, Web 2.0 is a term
often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web
from a collection of web sites to a full-fledged computing platform
serving web applications to end users.  It refers to a supposed
second-generation of Internet-based services — such as social
networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies —
that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. Across
SAS, all over the U.S. and all over the world students and teachers are
taking their learning to the masses and sharing what they are doing
with others.  The results are both impressive and often
inspiring. 
Jason Welker, Puxi
High School Economics teacher, has become a global leader in the use of
the online collaborative environment called a wiki.  For those of
you who are neophytes in online learning environments, a wiki is a web
site that allows users to collaborate dynamically by compiling editing
common sets of information.  The term wiki may be most familiar to
you from the now world famous and often used Wikipedia.  The
online collaborative encyclopedia allows users to add and edit content
dynamically, is monitored for accuracy by millions of passionate users
all over the world in virtually every language in the world.

Jason and his students have recently been nominated for “The Best Educational Wiki of 2007” by Edublogs
for their use of this online collaboration tool on the Wikinomics
site.  [For a profile of Welker, see page 10.] The most striking
part of this method of collaboration is its public nature. 
Students and teachers of economics all over the world are now flocking
to the site and the audience has driven the quality of the learning to
a whole new level of learning.  I encourage you to go to www.welkerswikinomics.com and check it out! (See photo above.)

Web 2.0 too big for you?

I’m often taken aback by the sheer amount of information that
is flashed before my eyes when I start trolling through the educational
Web 2.0 sites out there.  Our internationally recognized
educational technology leaders have done some neat little tricks to
make things a little easier for all of us by creating the one stop
shopping equivalent for our SAS online community called the http://teachers.saschina.org or http://blogs.saschina.org.

Follow these links and you’re taken to pages where
you’ll find on the right side of the screen a current list of the
latest updated student and teacher blogs from around SAS.  Down
the center will be reserved for the latest and greatest technology news
for our school.

On the left hand side are links to the latest podcasts (we are up to
number 37 this year!) and the link to the newly created  ParentTalk Online (www.sasparenttalk.org.)

This message is cross posted from www.sasparenttalk.org//?p=332

Technorati Tags: SAS, Parenttalk, Educational Wikis, Edublogs, Shanghai American School

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