Produced by the The Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International with support from the U.S. Department of Education, the toolkit was designed to help schools, districts and communities develop a common education vision for the future and to explore how that vision can be supported by technology. To get a birds-eye view of what the School 2.0 vision looks like, I recommend taking some time to click through the site and launch the interactive Learning Ecosystem Map.

Stakeholder videos inside the map feature students talking about how technology enhances their learning, including using email and texting to keep in touch with teachers, downloading podcasts to their iPods to study for tests, and watching online videos posted to their teachers’ websites. Parents discuss how their children use technology to personalize learning by working at their own pace, gathering more information when a subject interests them, and exploring different techniques to master daunting material.

After your visit, consider what you learned about School 2.0. Did you increase the depth and breadth of your understanding. Were the explanations instructive? Did you find yourself engaged and interested? Could you have learned as much at meeting on School 2.0? Did you search other sites to gain deeper understanding of new concepts and to identify critics and proponents of School 2.0 like I did? Congratulations! You just attended School 2.0.

What I wasn’t considering was that, School 2.0 is about the advancement of society, not simply technology as a nice-to-have. According to Jeff Utecht’s The Thinking Stick, “If you think schools need to change because of technology you have it wrong. Schools need to change because our society has changed.”

One of his examples helped me start to see School 2.0 as a new approach rather than an upgrade to School 1.0, addressing my worry that kids would be sent off to work on computers simply because the technology was there (e.g., when instructed to create a Powerpoint presentation, student gets so focused on the program’s bells and whistles that critical thinking and content organization go out the window). Utecht says, “School 2.0 needs to be new from the ground up starting with the foundation upon which we build our teaching practices.” In this model teachers serve as guides while students take ownership for learning by analyzing and processing information.

At an MIT education conference back in 2006, futurist Seely Brown predicted that for new technology to work, teachers would need to think about going from “sage on the stage to being a real mentor.” With his hybrid approach, traditional means are used to teach essential knowledge and critical thinking while technology is incorporated for “passion-based learning” to get students more engaged.

In other words, the School 2.0 discussion is not simply about throwing technology into the classroom. Instead, it considers how schools can adapt to changes brought about by technology, so that learning prepares students for the social and economic world that awaits.

If you think about it, School 2.0 is already happening before our eyes. Kids are putting podcasts on iPods to supplement classroom lectures; teachers are creating websites with links to online resources; administrators are emailing parents with school alerts; and libraries are lending downloadable ebooks. While there may be a price to pay during the learning curve, the world is changing, and education is along for the ride.

To understand more about the School 2.0 vision, link to David Warlick’s A Day in the Life of School 2.0.