David Warlick is bemoaning the lack of best practice examples of teaching using web 2.0 tools. This strikes a chord with me (a secondary IT teacher) because I’m always looking for those killer examples that I can point members of the English or History or Science departments to, to give them a Wow moment. The “Wow” that’s great work how do we get this blog/wiki thing going. I don’t like being the lone voice in the school trying to promote these new tools, I want company 
So often you find an interesting article perhaps written by a professional journalist that flags up this wonderful teacher who has used blogs / podcasts/ in the classroom. But when you actually click through to the children’s work (if there is a link), it’s not obvious what the kids are actually doing with the tools and the level of the work disappoints.
This example that David flagged up last night (via) is certainly the best example that I have seen of class writing, art work (above) and there are actually different points of views appearing in the comments of the blog posts – sounds obvious but it’s rare to see in practice.
When we flag up these examples of best practice we need to be more systematic now, we are past the stage of “hey another person used blogs in the classroom!”, we need to distinguish between primary and secondary education (secondary examples are more difficult to find), we need the age group, what kind of school is it? What is the ability level of the kids? How did we get this going? How is this integrating into the curriculum? What were the problems? And we need to focus more on the kids work rather than the educational rhetoric.
We’ve all used the vapourware technique. It’s inevitable. We have to get people and resources on board so we big things up, maybe some photos or a nice video showing kids doing interesting things with technology. Gets people exited. But now weneed to see Web 2.0 working in the classroom, we need to see the kids’ bytes on the screen.
