A teacher of the XXI century in a 2.0 classroom

Nowadays, with the development of the new technologies, we have the weapon to change the education system.

A 2.0 classroom is full of resources which make the process of learning easier. However, it can be a failure if the teacher is not competent, so, how should be the teacher of the XXI century in a 2.0 classroom?

The teacher has to be a competent person, and with the word competent I mean a person who has studied how to work with a 2.0 classroom, making it a success. A person who knows all the resources that internet and other techniques offer him. A person who knowing all the resources, knows which of them are better for his/her students. Because you can have an amazing 2.0 classroom, but if you don’t take into account the needs of your students, your 2.0 classroom will fail.

Teachers can build a good 2.0 classroom with many resources we have learned in class. From my point of view, the basic resource is a blog, it is a way of interpersonal communication, so we can use it to share information with our students, with the parents of our students or even with other teachers and schools. We can include in a blog the contents of our class, activities we do, and the teacher can also give his/her personal opinions, he/she can provide interesting links for his/her students. Anyway, blogs are a good tool in the process of teaching-learning in our education system. 

In the blogs, the teacher can make use of photographs, but as you know, there are pictures with copyright, nevertheless we have the resources to share pictures free of copyright, i.e. flickr cc, www.foto-gratis.es, google advanced image search, among others. In addition, if the teacher want to include some sounds in the blog or in an activity in the class, he/she can make use of www.freesound.org a web page with a wide variety of sounds. 

Another resource the teacher can make use is ‘Hotpotatoes’, which is a set of programs that allows the production of interactive web-based teaching exercises which can be delivered to any computer. The suite consists on six individual programs. It is useful for the teacher because he/she is creating a web page. It can be used by other teachers, other pupils, other schools from different parts of the world. Besides, it can be used everywhere even at students home. 

Furthermore, there are more resources, for example the social networks, they are Web-based services which allow the creation of profiles (public or semipublic) in a service or system. The user decides what he she wants to share and with whom to share and the teacher and his/her students can also make comments, include graphics, photos, videos, links, … So it is a way of interacting and sharing.

Moreover, there are many tools the teacher can use to share and save files, such as P2P file sharing which allows users to access media files such as books music movies and games using a P2P software program that searcher for other connected computers on a P2P networks and locates the desired content.

In the same way, there are resources for the teacher to improve his/her pronunciation, for example if he/she has any doubt with a specific word he/she has just to visit a web page: www.howjsay.com which gives you the real pronunciation of a word pronounced by a native person, not a machine. Talking about the dictionaries, the best one is cambridge on line, it is very complete, it gives you the meaning and also the transcription in two varieties: American English and British English.

These are some resources I wanted to share with you, but obviously there are more of them. It is up to you to keep investigating about your learning.