Well now, I have finally completed the 23 Things I heard everyone talking about when I entered the MAT program. Although I will not use all of the Things for my classroom, I certainly appreciate learning about them. Many of the things I find useful I already used, such as Google Docs and Calendar. Other Things I found fun, but may not actually use, such as the on-line image generators. However, there were a number of tools I had never heard of that will be very useful in my teaching career. I really like the capabilities that Delicious and LiveBinders provide. Having these resources available where ever I can access the cloud is very useful, and the ability to share resources opens up a ton of educational opportunities for students.
Where to go from here? I think one of the purposes of this 23 Things exercise is to give people the confidence to be curious enough to continue learning about Web 2.0 applications. Technology is a fast moving field, and you may end up feeling that learning some of these tools was a waste of time. However, this process is about committing to being a life-long learner. I think it important to continue this Web 2.0 learning quest not just for the benefit of ourselves, but to learn what may help our students or find out what they find interesting. After all, the key to reaching your students and getting them to be more engaged is getting to know them. The next generation of students are all about learning the next cool online tool, and we better at least have heard about it!
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