How true the lyrics ring of Wake Up Everybody by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes:

“Wake up all the teachers time to teach a new way
Maybe then they’ll listen to whatcha have to say
Cause they’re the ones who’s coming up and the world is in their hands when you teach the children teach em the very best you can.

The world won’t get no better if we just let it be
The world won’t get no better we gotta change it yeah, just you and me.”

We obviously need to change the way we teach the current techno-savvy, social networking generation. Why? Well, I think Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University, hits the nail on the head in his 5-star digital ethnography video, A Vision of Students Today, which delves into the minds of Millennials and the state of education today.

I was recently introduced to the profound works of Professor Wesch via the Web 2.0 class that I am currently enrolled in, and I have taken the liberty of embedding the video here for your viewing pleasure:

A precursor to this work was Professor Wesch’s The Machine is Us/ing Us that deals with how the web changes the way people interact. And, indeed it does, the web also changes the way can reach our students. If the internet and all its inherent Web 2.0 tools allow us to engage an increased number of scholars, then we need to learn how to use it more effectively in our classrooms.

Thank you Professor Wesch for these thought provoking videos. And, much gratitude to Jim Walker for introducing me to them.

But how to blog effectively in middle school classrooms is the real question for me?

I am currently enrolled in a Web 2.0 class that has certainly enlightened me on how to answer this fundamental question, so I’m in the midst of gathering information and learning from others…Stay tuned on how I plan to begin blogging at my school.