Journal 2

Breathing fire into Web 2.0
By Justin Hardman and David Carpenter

Technology is advancing at high speed, there is not enough time to confront and assimilate all the new advances and to understand how this advances will benefit students at schools. Besides the challenge to improve teaching’s education techniques, there is a lot of education budget cuts that difficult schools to be update. We can see and understand how this lack of resources is delaying students to learn how to use new equipment and to be familiar with the resources that all this advances offer them to make easier their tasks.
We can see how technology can made the difference through the appropriate design of software, programs such as My Dragon Net (http://dragonet.hkis.edu.hk) allows communication between students, teachers, and community, serve as an electronic portfolio, and provide curriculum development. Justin Hardman worked for two years in the design of My Dragon Net with students, parents, and teachers to meet all their needs and integrated them in an essential communication tool. My Dragon Net facilitate the communication, teachers introduce information and students received on time. The program offers calendar to be aware of due dates at school or to see dates of different activities, it also offers e-mail messages, document access, multimedia resources, and information about different activities such as after school program activities, sport teams events, clubs and activities outside school. It is a big challenge to communicate all the community through technology.

How do I plan to involve my kindergarten parents and teachers with technology?

One easy way is using the e-mail, or the telephone to remind them about important dates or important information. Some people maybe think that it is obsolete to use these devices, but we need to be aware that in our society a lot of people do not have the economic resources to buy a computer, neither to pay an extra monthly bill for Internet.
What is going to be the main goal in the group K-2 about technology?

The first step is to introduce students with the appropriate knowledge and to be familiar with the use of this technology. They must know the function of the basic technology and understand that technology is created to made our life easier.