Learning is Change

The Perfect Learning Environment

itunes pic
This podcast is of a discussion that I had with my 7th and 8th grade students about what they think the perfect learning environment would be like. I asked them a few guiding questions, but their ideas were purely their own. I think there is a lot of insight here. If you would like to follow the online discussion, you can go to our conversate page at http://conversate.org/conversation/3JTD3.

01.31.07

Cores 1-4:

  1. Day 2 of trying to get Learnerblogs to cooperate.
  2. If it will:
    • Post your Sem2_Week4 Weekly Authentic and Del.icio.us post.
    • Comment on other Del.icio.us posts.
    • Nominate for Authenticity Awards.
    • Work on Personal Curriculum.
  3. If it won’t
    • Door Number 3.

Morning Podcasts and the New Class

 

    I started podcasting in my car on the way to school. This is the one time that I am completely alone during the day. Barring a hideous accident that threatens life and limb, nothing is going to interrupt me and my thoughts. So, I started thinking really big. I started talking about the future of literacy and then meandered into convincing every teacher to pick up a laptop and start blogging with their classes, I have finally settled on constructing better schools for the current generation (You).

Yesterday I began my podcast by asking myself about the current Graduation Requirements. Are all of these things really essential if many of you will never need to know how to explicate a poem or find the derivative of cosine. We are building students that are all alike. How will you ever stand out in high school, college, or life if we are merely creating different sized versions of the same student. So, I started thinking about what the real graduation requirements should be. I came up with these skills as essential, the ones that all other content can be filtered through:

  1. Collaboration, and building upon other’s ideas
  2. Writing for specific purposes
  3. Creating and pacing your own learning
  4. Thinking critically and coming to evidence-based conclusions

But what kind of classes do you take in order to get these skills?

Well, I am proposing that the first class that would get at these new Graduation Requirements would be a class in Collaborative Writing. This class would consist of personally selected projects that involved research, writing, revision, and a huge dose of communication. All students would set up two ways of writing/publishing their work: a wiki and a collaborative document editor. The wiki would be used mainly for research and idea generation. The students, working in teams, would start pulling resources together and linking and writing about them on their wikis. They would also be doing the scholarly writing on their collaborative document editor (like Google Documents). In order to generate more ideas, they would hold weekly podcasts/interviews that measured how they were doing on their projects. They would post these so that all students in the class could see just what others were doing in order to accomplish their writing goals. We would also set up a space and time for students to interview experts on their topics using a blog, a skypecast, or a simple e-mail. Throughout the class, the students would constantly be revising their definition of collaboration in the 21st century, aiming for a class definition that gets at all of the skills they think will be useful later on in life.

Obviously, this particular class needs some fleshing out, but I think that it would be one worth taking and worth teaching. I believe that more writing and thinking would get done in a class like this than in any two composition classes. And I think that is really the point.

The Discovery School within a School

itunes pic
A colleague of mine and I were brainstorming all of the technology implementation possibilities for the next school, when he suggested that what we were talking about was not merely two classes (Social Studies and Language Arts) collaborating, but that we were shifting the paradigm of teaching to a School within a School.

On this podcast, I attempt to flesh out what a technology-centric School within a School would look like and I hit upon a couple of things:
1. Online interactive notebooks.
2. Collaborative note taking.
3. Curriculum wiki’s that are edited by students and teachers.
4. Teacher reflective blogging.
5. Strands of curriculum that students could learn all disciplines within.
6. Synchronous and Asynchronous online discussion.

01.29.07

Core 1:

  • Present the digital stories and talk about why these things are perfect?
  • Why should we be searching for perfection?
  • How do these “ideal things” show us what we want out of society?

Core 2:

  • Write-On: In working with the timeline of the 19th century, what trends did you find that we haven’t talked about yet?
  • Start reading from Romanticism.
  • How do the concepts of romanticism surface in the writing of Romanticism?

Core 3:

  1. Write-On: Why do we tell stories?
  2. Go over the project outline.
  3. Explore the following Digital Storytelling resources and figure out (write down) what the major elements that a digital story must have.

Core 4:

  1. Continue work on your Goals:
    • Make sure that each need is provided for (stability, food, water, shelter, social interaction, diversion, entertainments, warmth, etc.).
    • Are there any wants that are important too?
    • Are everyone’s skills being used completely?

01.26.07

Core 1:

  1. Continue to work on Bubblr Ideal Car, Vacation, Family, or meal digital stories.
  2. Share the digital stories and talk about why these things are perfect?
  3. Why should we be searching for perfection?

Core 2:

  1. Discuss-On: How can world events in literature, war, economics, and politics influence thought?
  2. Timeline the 19th century using ning.
  3. Here are the other timelines for your to draw from:

Core 3:

  1. Write-On: What is a Writing Error?
  2. What are the most common writing errors that you think you are making?
  3. What are the errors that others are making?

Core 4:

  1. Work on your Outline and Goals for our survival simulation on Google Documents. (Two different documents.)

01.25.07

Core 1:

  1. Write-On: Why did you choose the words that you did?
  2. How are you going to inject these new found words into the different discourses of your lives?
  3. Along with choosing the right words and choosing the right situations for those words, I would like to propose the idea that we start choosing the right society for those situations. If we were going to think about society as a framework for all of our interactions, we would like that framework to be as perfect as possible. So, what we are going to start today is part of the Utopia/Dystopia unit. You are going to start thinking about perfection by revealing to one another what your idea of the perfect vacation, car, meal, or family is. The best part, however, is that you are going to reveal it to us in comic strip form. Using Bubblr.
  4. [swf width=”400″ height=”320″]http://www.pimpampum.net/bubblr/bubblr_blog.swf?id=5557[/swf]

Core 2:

  1. Write-On: What are all of the -Isms that affect your life right now? Why do they exist?
  2. What do these words mean to you (in words, drawings, ideas)?
    • Industrialism
    • Feminism
    • Abolitionism
    • Romanticism
    • Transcendentalism
  3. Give an overview of the 5 -Isms of the 19th century.
    • What are the things that you know about this time period?

Core 3:

  1. Check vocab homework.
  2. Today you are going to have more time to work on your blog posts and del.icio.us, but I want you to take a look at one of your posts specifically. I want you to look for all of the things that you would consider errors. I would like you to bold them. I want you to be able to look at how you see yourself as a writer. How much of your writing do you think is “wrong?”

Core 4:

  1. Start your brainstorming about characters and setting for your Survival Simulation using Google Docs.

01.24.07

Core 1:

  1. Write-On: Why should you care which words you use in talking to your friends?
  2. Explore some resources for learning about words you want to learn about:
  3. Add five words that you want to put into your vocabulary and write down all of the pertinent information (an exact copy of the elements in your vocabulary book) on a piece of paper and staple it into your vocab book.

Core 2:

  1. Write-On: What is there difference between an idea and a belief?
  2. What happens when you string enough beliefs together?
  3. What idiologies exist today?
    • How do you think they got started?

Core 3:

  1. Write-On: Why did you pick the words that you did to get to know better?
  2. Now that we have become word collectors, we need to put them to good use, and what better way than to become sentence collectors as well. We must be able to use these words as powerfully as we can, understanding just how they fit together. We must come to know sentences intimately so that we can wield them to their greatest effect. We will become Word Doctors, identifying areas of concern in our writing and prescribing solutions for what ails our words and sentences.
  3. Brainstorm-On: Come up with all of the things that can go “wrong” in a sentence.
    • Why are they wrong?

Core 4:

  1. Discuss-On: How does your personal dystopia compare and contrast with the world of Harrison Bergeron?
  2. Why is it important to dream up, write out, and/or analyze a dystopian society?
  3. Where is there room for rebellion in a dystopian society?
    • Where is there room for rebellion in our society?
    • Why is rebellion so important?
  4. How should we measure the worth/value of a society?

Why All Teachers Should Be Using Web 2.0

itunes pic
I have been thinking a lot about this question. Should all teachers be using the Read/Write Web in their classrooms, or am I merely a part of the latest educational technology trend. I try to answer it in a fairly in-depth, before-school podcast.