The Bistro is Open (5/14)

Hi all, this my first post for EME6414. Blake's Bistro is the restaurant-themed name of my middle school classroom that I teach so it felt like I should bring the same vibe to this sphere.

I feel like it's appropriate to just dive into my experience with what is Web 2.0. I'm 31, so I've predominantly grown up in a world where social networking was always an option and available to my age cohort. A very formal way of saying that I've always been exposed to technology.

The first big social network, and a lot of my peers in this course can probably empathize, was MySpace. Tom. The whole phenomenon around the 2006-2008 time frame. I think the biggest draw for me, personally, was the ability to personalize and tailor your own web page to the most specific of features. In my case, it was blaring hardcore music immediately into a MySpace page visitor's ears, probably causing them to implode and quickly exit my page. Also, there was this feature that was integral for the draw of MySpace... listing your "top friends" on your page. This was such a transparent and, at the same time, brutal way of letting your peers know where you stood with them. Somehow this feature of social networking 20 years ago feels like it objectively held more weight than whether my in laws 'liked' or 'loved' my new profile picture on Facebook. I bizarre tangent to start off my reflections on my history with Web 2.0... but I know where I will look to next-- gaming! I'm going chronologically; mid-to-late 2000s are where we're headed next with my experiences interacting online through games like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Halo. See you later this week.

Comments

Does the digital native/immigrant dichotomy work?

I felt, as I was reading the Prenska article, that my knee-jerk reaction was that I was fortunate to have grown up at the right time (mid-late 2000s), when Web 2.0 features were coming into mainstream culture. I was learning them like everyone else, and I had an advantage. My reaction to the digital immigrants was that these were relatively older users I saw on Facebook, either using ChatGPT for the first time and sharing a tacky image (see Figure 1), or exclusively using their online interactions in my local ‘rants, raves, and reviews’ to initiate arguments. My brain's intuition couldn't have been right. Is there a right way to interact with online communities? That's what constitutes me as a digital native? Are these users who use Facebook and AI in those other ways digital immigrants? Although it's a niche of folks who argue on Facebook, they still use that social media website as it was intended: to connect and interact with others online. So, what is ...

Prodigy Slander won't be tolerated....well, maybe

Happy Summer, educators. In Florida, anyway! While embarking on my Reddit Challenge, I came across a post on r/edtech about the learning game Prodigy, which has role-playing elements that I've used in my own math instruction. I figured I'd post my initial reactions to this article and talk about how EdTech in the classroom, and more specifically, game-based learning, has been more divisive than we think. https://web.archive.org/web/20260516165144/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/homework-video-games-ed-tech/687198/ The author of this Atlantic article, Will Oremus, begins and ends the piece with observations of his son playing the Prodigy learning platform that many classrooms are adopting and integrating into their curricula. From my personal experience in a niche example in 1 school district out of the nation's 18,000ish, Prodigy is used more in elementary contexts (K-5) and then tapers off at the middle and high school levels. The author's...

My students' obsession with GeoGuessr, Google Maps, & Google Earth

If you walked into my classroom during independent work time, you might think some of my students were completely off task. When they're finished early on Thursdays and Fridays, a surprising number of them immediately open GeoGuessr or start wandering around Google Maps and Google Earth. They're dropping themselves into random countries, zooming into neighborhoods, following highways, debating where a picture was taken, and mostly finding each other's houses. My first instinct as a teacher was exactly what you'd expect: "Seriously? We're doing math." But the more I've watched them over the past year, the more I've started wondering if something deeper is happening. GeoGuessr isn't asking students to memorize capitals or recite facts about countries. Instead, it rewards observation, pattern recognition, and spatial reasoning. Students begin noticing road markings, vegetation, mountain ranges, architecture, languages, climate, traffic pattern...

Blake's Bistro