Reflection 2.0

I just got home from facilitating a parent discussion/workshop on web 2.0 for social and educational uses.  I created a resource site for the parents at wikispaces - you can check it out here: Parent Workshop Resources.  Please note that the wiki is focused mainly on parent resources for online safety, but the workshop focused on the positive and educational benefits of web 2.0.  I’m particularly fond of the videos I shared (on the wiki), I think they do a good job of going beyond just myspace and the like.  It’s still pretty fresh in my mind to be able to reflect very deeply, but here are my initial thoughts:

• We didn’t have the best advertising for the event, so it wasn’t well-attended.  However, the parents that were there initiated excellent discussions and it was wonderful to be able to connect with them on a more intimate level than I would have been able to if it were a larger group.
• I was very disappointed that for some reason no one showed up to take down filters (as was planned), which meant I was unable to actually show parents sites like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube.  It made it rather difficult to actually do the presentation I had prepared, which was going to focus on parents participating in social networking (at their own level/peer group) to better understand why their children are so attracted to it.  I had to attempt to explain MySpace and Facebook to parents who had never seen the sites, which is harder than I thought!  Also, some of the videos I wanted to share were from YouTube, so those were blocked as well. I’m not sure what happened, but hopefully it was just a simple misunderstanding that will be cleared up for next week’s workshop.
• It was really interesting to actually talk about social networking with parents rather than students and my PLN - what a different perspective!  The parents had varying levels of comfort with technology, so that made the discussions even more interesting.  It was so wonderful to give the parents just a taste of the possibilities of the web today and see their minds start working and wondering.  That’s the best part of my experience with learning and web 2.0 - the curiousity it inspires.  There’s always something new to learn!

I’ll ponder more on this, but while I may have only reached 4 parents (and an assistant principal) tonight, I still believe I’m fighting the good fight……………

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