Lesson 9 - School 2.0, Part 1 - 21st Century Students and Skills

Finally - a post for lesson 9! I struggled with this podcast as a means to get ideas for instruction. I won't mention his name since he is on Google alert! I like his little quips and I found his insights on internet safety to be very valuable. As I reflected on the podcast I kept coming back to collaboration - thinking of his Model T lesson. I have my students collaborate a lot at the K-1 level. I think a team writing experience between two classrooms would be very exciting for them. Many times in my classroom, we start a story and pass it to teams to write the next part. The kids get very excited about the possibilities. I think you could do the same on a Wiki... Start a story and pass it to a team of students in another classroom. They could illustrate and scan a picture on to match their text. then it would come back tot he first team to add the next part and so on. You could have multiple stories going. When they are complete, the teams could video themselves acting them out and put the videos on the Wiki. We could then compare the performances for the different ways the students interpreted the story. The more I write, the more this seems like a monumental task but maybe not...

Assignment 10 - New Perspectives on the Challenges We Face

Dr. Zhao had some amazing insights in the podcast with Alan November. A couple of points got me thinking...
** Increasing students ability to communicate globally with regard to language and culture. This would be a major jump up from traditional penpals to sharing our language in culture through websites, blogs, podcasts, and video. There is certainly the challenge of finding an international connection but increasing this kind of communication would be very possible at the elementary level.
**A requirement for students to particpate in online learning in order to graduate. Love this one!! Would this requirement have to be set at the state level or could we do it locally? And who takes on responsibility of educating and swaying the powers at be? We would open a lot of doors for students if we offered online classes that expand on the current subjects that we offer.
**I think there are implications for staff development as well. No longer do we need to pay thousands of dollars to bring in a single presenter when we may be able to participate in national presentations and conferences that are offered online.

Collaborative Bookmarking (Reflection 2)

Now that I have explored collaborative bookmarking, I can see many possibilities for my grade level. My grade level (K) frequently teaches around thematic units. We will often discuss or share ideas at meetings or on the fly! If we all set up a Del.icio.us accounts, we could set up two tags. One for sites used as teacher resources and one used for sites that can be used with kids. Since the themes change we could be adding to the tags monthly. Once you have a commitment from teachers to do this, there would be a whole new wealth of infomation being found and shared. One benefit of this would be an increase of new technology used with students in the classroom. I have been particularly worried to see so many classroom computers off recently. Maybe if more teachers are finding and bookmarking cool sites for kids to use, they will actually get used!! I am planning on using our summer curriculum day to help everyone set up an account - What do you think?