Antes del fin de escuela mañana, los estudiantes de la clase de Sra. Garza se prepararon el “videoblog”–
Students from our Spanish AP class prepared this videoblog from their class for the Notes in Spanish videoblog project on YouTube. Our staff and I helped slightly with the video editing process and uploading the project, but the students did all the work! One of the students in the film is the chairperson of our Vision technology committee, as well!
Not only am I thrilled to see students participating in a blog, but creating their own videoblog and interacting with other students or college students who have created theirs. It’s a great opportunity for students to interact across school boundaries. (Now the only downside is that YouTube is blocked to students here, but it is available to teachers, so we can share the results with the students in the class).
Karl Fisch at Arapahoe High School shared an interesting project going on at his campus–teachers covering the novel 1984 are asking parents to voluntarily read and blog along with the students.
One fascinating aspect of it is that the teachers asked the students to blog about some “blogging expectations” for their parents. It’ll be interesting seeing how the parent participation piece goes. I’m thinking it will be a great way for parents to empathize with their students about the amount of work they are doing in school, and also feel more involved with the assignment.
Thoughts or ideas on doing an assignment where parents are asked to participate?
I’ve been working the last month or so on a project with one of our English teachers, Marcia Curtis, relating to the novel Kite Runner. She was interested in connecting with a school in Afghanistan so that students could interview students there, or communicate with them directly in some way. We did quite a bit of searching and I ran across an organization that builds schools in Afghanistan, and she contacted them about finding students to share with.
The director emailed her back–
“Unfortunately Afghanistan barely has electricity, even in the capital. Thus, few students even have regular access to computers. I don’t know of any high schools with the infrastructure to allow its students to communicate via e-mail. There may be select students who have such tools
afforded to them but those tend to be in the wealthy areas of the larger cities.”
I think even with our knowledge of the difficulties in Afghanistan, the severity of the response was still somewhat surprising to both of us. I’ve been thinking about that email a lot in light of the YouTube video by a college student that I posted about a few days ago.
Technology can afford us the opportunity to learn about the world in a real, grass roots level way–even if what we learn is that there are great inequities.
What a powerful learning experience for Marcia’s students when she could share that email with them. How much more real did Afghanistan become for them as she shared that, and shared photos of Afghani children from online sites she found? The global connection isn’t always about successes. It isn’t always about our ability to collaborate on a project.
But it is always about getting a glimpse, just for a minute, of what another person’s experience is like. And after all, isn’t that glimpse what can connect us?
This international project from Clarence Fisher at the blog Remote Access is fascinating.
Students from four countries are participating in what he calls an “international assembly line” on a research question. Students in schools in Kuala Lumpur and Columbia are providing one part of the project and then students in Canada and the United States will complete it and put the multi-media together. They are using a wiki to plan the project.
I should add that these are middle school students participating in this global learning opportunity.
