Have You Ever Noticed.....

.... How little of the content that you are expected to teach in your school's curriculum shows up on Technorati?

Or how few of the webpages that you access, looking for resources you can use in class, have RSS feeds to bring the latest news to you?

What does this say about how current many of the topcs that we teach are?

technorati tags:RSS, technorati, sigh

Comments

[Cathy Nelson]

Volumes Mr. Fisher, Volumes. Maybe some of us web 2.0 savvy educators should ask to tag our standards so they can be searched? Maybe we should ask to be on the committees and request that the standards as revised be made public on a wiki or blog that folks can subscribe to to see the evolution of that final phase of the standards we devote ourselves to teaching. If the web 2.0 tools are useful in some part of our teacher toolbox (like planning), we might actually use them as teaching tools not just planning tools. It's a beginning anyway.

[Jason Cummings]

I would suggest that this has less to do with the relevancy or irrelevancy of the topics that we´re teaching than is does the with the media by which it is being transmitted. The content creators and providers, i.e. that academics that write our texts "produce knowledge" in our various fields, are, perhaps, more retrograd in their approach to technology than are secondary educators. Professors, in general, are thinking refereed journal, refereed journal and more refereed journal. If a few more good professors would keep blogs, run podcasts of their courses etc. those of us in secondary education would see our still-relevant topics showing up on technorati and in I-tunes. Again, it´s not so much that the material is less valid, it´s that those who create and publish it are still largely stuck on publishing print sources.

[Rick Biche]

Very true, and so the question becomes, how do you as a teacher strike a balance between the more recent and evolving content and the older, more static content? A science example addressing the role of the water cycle in weather and climate patterns can include a feed from the national weather service (US) and other equivalents regarding hurricane and tropical weather outlooks. Meanwhile, static content can be accessed to provide context for understanding the incoming content. Would going this far for each content standard be an advance? for some no, but for the majority of teachers I think the answer would be yes.