AGTA 2013 - Teaching Geography in the 21st Century: A Web 2.0 Approach

March 2013 will (hopefully) see the release of the Australian Geography Curriculum. I see this as a wonderful opportunity to enhance some of the excellent geography already happening in classrooms around Australia to include 21st century skills. Geography is one key learning area that can do this so well, and with the tools now available, make it real and engaging for the students.

The Australian Curriculum was developed from the Melbourne Declaration and therefore looks at seven general capabilities that all students need. These general capabilities include:

• Literacy
• Numeracy
• Information and communication technology capability
• Critical and creative thinking
• Personal and social capability
• Ethical behaviour
• Intercultural understanding

For more detail go to the ACARA website

Web 2.0 is not represented in the ICT capability strand alone. When teaching a Geography class using Web 2.0, you are probably using most, if not all of these capabilities. Therefore, the challenge we have now is to delve through the long list of tools to work out what we could and should use, and why. So much has been written about 21st century learning, and there are so many tools out there, that it can become overwhelming. However, don't let this deter you!

The presentation today will only look at some of these tools. I have presented these as my 'Top 11" using a program called Jux (an online web based content presentation tool). The presentation is embedded below but you can also access it by clicking on this link - My top 11 web2.0 tools in the classroom. All links throughout the presentation are underlined.

Other resources on Web2.0 tools can also be found on my blog so have a read of previous posts. Hopefully there will be some tools in here that will be useful for you!