http://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/event/description?instance_id=10609 This is a link to an Elluminate archive session between two teachers, Vickie Davis and Julie Lindsay from Camilla, Georgia and Doha, State of Qatar, respectively, who met online while reading each others blog and after reading Thomas Friedman's, The World is Flat, decided to create a flat classroom using Web 2.0 tools.
I was so taken with what these teachers are doing with their students half a world apart and how they have gotten them to collaborate online using many different 2.0 tools. Their work is constructivist, differentiated, engaging and utilizes aspects of Cooperative learning while assessing students individually in part by their participation which is logged by the Web 2.0 tool. The students have to work synchronously and asynchronously due to the various time zones each of the classes resides in.
See if you think this is what we all should be aspiring to as we move our students toward the use Web 2.0 tools and the skills they will need to keep them competitive for the workforce of the future.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Initial thoughts about Engaging Students
Last year, at about this time, I was writing my welcome back letter to my teachers and staff at Holland Central School after attending the first joint BOCES Conference on High School's New Face I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to sit in on Will Richardson's class on utilizing technology and web tools to create blogs, wikis, and podcasts. Unfortunately, I did not bring a laptop of my own and had to share so I didn't get as broad a hands on experience as I would have liked; but I was able to network with one of my teachers, Scott Hunt, and could easily see the utility in the concepts he was talking about. Scott is a great teacher within our school system and I know through our conversations that he wants to stretch me and our Board in regard to policies on the utilization of the internet for students.
In that letter to staff, I stated, "I think it would be fair to say that the speakers opened our eyes to some of the concepts, ideas and challenges that will not only affect our children, but perhaps even us and the very fabric of our society. Our staff development day on September 1, 2006, will consist of a sharing of some of this information that I think will impact your thoughts, just as it has ours. We will need to continue our progress towards academic excellence and helping all of our students succeed at increasingly higher levels and in new ways... In some ways, even the definition of literacy is changing in ways that necessitate the use of technology in new ways both for ourselves and for our students. ...it will be necessary to examine the way we look at relationships between ourselves and our students in order to maximize the potential for students to do increasingly more rigorous and relevant work.... this year begins a new look at our students and ourselves as we ask"brutally honest questions" about how we are doing with the preparation of our students to sucessfully navigate in a world of unpredictability.
I didn't do as good a job as I would have liked with following up on what I stated in my letter. This year, after attending the second joint BOCES Conference on High School's New Face under the tutelage of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and armed with a laptop of my own both in the class and back at the hotel,(although I did have to call my oldest son to trouble shoot why it wasn't working with the hotel's wifi-which he was able to talk me through over the phone) I was able to practice at night what I learned during the day and this helped cement the concepts more so with the extra practice.
My dilemna now is how to continue to roll the learning out at what pace for the utmost benefit of our students and teachers. With about one quarter to one third of our students in the state not graduating, I feel a real sense of urgency to" get r done" in order to stop the bleeding of children leaving our schools without the skills to succeed for very long in a world that is changing each and every day at an incredible pace. On the other hand, moving too fast without the necessary support for the teachers can kill an initiative rather quickly.
I will be utilizing many of the resources that Sheryl shared with us to make the point with my staff that we need to step up the pace in the areas of using technology and web tools to engage students, plan for personalization of learning, and utilize for our own personalized professional development within our professional learning community.
Knowing my staff as well as I do, I don't think this will be a hard sell because of the tremendous sense of pride they take in their work and the sense of compassion they have for their students.
Anyone having a sense for what the proper pace might be for rolling out these kinds of ideas, I would love to hear from.
In that letter to staff, I stated, "I think it would be fair to say that the speakers opened our eyes to some of the concepts, ideas and challenges that will not only affect our children, but perhaps even us and the very fabric of our society. Our staff development day on September 1, 2006, will consist of a sharing of some of this information that I think will impact your thoughts, just as it has ours. We will need to continue our progress towards academic excellence and helping all of our students succeed at increasingly higher levels and in new ways... In some ways, even the definition of literacy is changing in ways that necessitate the use of technology in new ways both for ourselves and for our students. ...it will be necessary to examine the way we look at relationships between ourselves and our students in order to maximize the potential for students to do increasingly more rigorous and relevant work.... this year begins a new look at our students and ourselves as we ask"brutally honest questions" about how we are doing with the preparation of our students to sucessfully navigate in a world of unpredictability.
I didn't do as good a job as I would have liked with following up on what I stated in my letter. This year, after attending the second joint BOCES Conference on High School's New Face under the tutelage of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and armed with a laptop of my own both in the class and back at the hotel,(although I did have to call my oldest son to trouble shoot why it wasn't working with the hotel's wifi-which he was able to talk me through over the phone) I was able to practice at night what I learned during the day and this helped cement the concepts more so with the extra practice.
My dilemna now is how to continue to roll the learning out at what pace for the utmost benefit of our students and teachers. With about one quarter to one third of our students in the state not graduating, I feel a real sense of urgency to" get r done" in order to stop the bleeding of children leaving our schools without the skills to succeed for very long in a world that is changing each and every day at an incredible pace. On the other hand, moving too fast without the necessary support for the teachers can kill an initiative rather quickly.
I will be utilizing many of the resources that Sheryl shared with us to make the point with my staff that we need to step up the pace in the areas of using technology and web tools to engage students, plan for personalization of learning, and utilize for our own personalized professional development within our professional learning community.
Knowing my staff as well as I do, I don't think this will be a hard sell because of the tremendous sense of pride they take in their work and the sense of compassion they have for their students.
Anyone having a sense for what the proper pace might be for rolling out these kinds of ideas, I would love to hear from.
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