I think that the web offers a wide-range of wonderful learning opportunities for ESOL or NESB students.  It is really important that teachers know their students well enough and understand their needs, but also that teachers know the range of technologies that they have available to them to best support their students’ learning.
When we look at online learning opportunities, these range from applications that can be completely open - viewed and contributed to by anyone in the world, right through to applications that are very closed - only certain people …

I question why finding information needs to be difficult or time-consuming in order to make the learning happen. ie. I use wikipedia all the time as a starting place if I want to find information on a new topic - particularly if I know very little about that topic.

I recently wrote this article for the Education Review. It is a very concise summary of my thinking 6 months after completion of my research. “It seems somewhat ironic that while schools try to find extra funding to increase student and teacher access to ICT, the tool that many students already have in their pockets is overlooked and its use actively denied through restrictive school policy…”

This is another discussion that I am cross-posting from the School of Education online course in which I was a guest contributor. Popping it here to see what others think.
The modern web - namely web2.0 or the read/write web allows any user to create and share content with the world. Harnessing the power of this audience is certainly not limited to the secondary classroom - infact there are a huge number of highly successful primary school blogs, wikis and podcasts that attract audiences from around the world.
The fact …

Once again, this is cross posted from discussions I was contributing to in an online paper at the School of Education.
I was trying to share my feelings as to why it is often seen that the integration of ICT in secondary schools is lagging behind that of primary and ECE.
I think one of the things is that in secondary if teachers want to use the computers - they take their class to the computer room. There are very few computers in individual classrooms. This means that students go outside of …