“We can no longer live in a world in which information is scarce, and the teacher’s role is to hand deliver content to children. The old certainties of a world defined by four classroom walls and impermeable dependencies and complex systems that require flexibility, responsiveness, and imagination boundaries have disappeared forever, replaced by global interconnectedness.”
(Jacobsen et al., 2002)
Connecting to the Global Community
Creating a classroom community is important to build and foster relationships between students and their peers. But, there is an enormous opportunity available to students to connect to a much larger community – the world. The article below written by the Canadian Education Association describes why and how these opportunities arise.
Technology-Enabled Knowledge Building in High School
Summary of the Article
The article posted above describes building knowledge and collaborative communities through technology-enabled classrooms. In the current age of the digital society, advancements in technology and the internet has allowed people to become more connected than ever before. The immediate access to current information and the instant connection between people and ideas is shifting education into a participatory learning environment. Participatory technologies such as social media can help build a community within a class, school, city or even a country. This instantaneous connection helps people share, assess, build, improve and collaborate ideas with each other in a fashion that has never been possible before. Today’s society constantly delivers huge amounts of information through the internet from all across the globe. Students and teachers should take advantage of these technologies by participating in the collaborative online social learning that is occurring right now. The next generation of youth will inherit a global, socially connected, and media rich world and it is a responsibility of teachers to prepare students for that world.
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