Yesterday, I took the library to the students. As those of you who read my blog may know, we’re closed for a renovation, and I’m currently working out of the ninth grade center library, which is a trek from the main high school. I So in an effort to bring services TO the students, I’m experimenting with various methods of outreach. We’re deep into a major project on Vietnam, and students are involved in creating a digital biography of a soldier from the Vietnam wall, […]
Category: Collaboration
The peanut butter cup effect
How do you empower students to engage with a text in such a way that they can come to their own understanding of it? I just participated in a fascinating live blogging experiencewith Maura Moritz’s and Karl Fisch’s students at Arapahoe High School. The students were using the inner/outer circle discussion method in their classroom to discuss the book. While the inner circle held a discussion in the room, the outer circle was live blogging their discussion and holding their own with a few of us from […]
Lock, stock, and barrel
I don’t often write ‘inside info’ kind of posts, but in the last two days, I witnessed an amazing example of a learning network in action. Twitter, a site I’m a huge fan of as many of you know, announced it would be going down for maintenance for most of Saturday. Since a number of us rely on twitter to keep us “in the loop” with a network of colleagues, a plan spontaneously hatched on Twitter for our whole network to “move” for the day to a different […]
Like schoolkids
I feel like a giddy schoolgirl this morning–just having so much fun interacting with other educators around the world who are also giddy about what they are doing. While most of us in the U.S. were sleeping, Jeff Utecht of Thinking Stick in Shanghai was testing out a new site called WizIq (a new site that is a virtual classroom, with chat, sharing, etc.) and holding a skypechat to discuss it. Then as I was just getting up, my Skype started ringing, and Chris Betcher(in Australia) was […]
Collaborative research–Rethinking the model
As I have been doing some reading all summer, my whole notion of research is shifting somewhat. Maybe it is reflecting the shift that many of our students are living, as well. I’m coming to realize more and more that although in schools we treat research as a somewhat solitary activity, in its true form, research is a very networked activity. As George Siemens writes, in describing Connectivism, “learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity.” He goes on to point out that learners “remain current in […]
The power of collaboration
Uber librarian Joyce Valenza has created an extremely helpful wiki listing copyright free music and art sites for student projects. Since it’s a wiki, anyone using it can also contribute sites to it, and create as she calls it, an “uberwikipathfinder” for copyright free media. The wiki’s sidebar lists links for music, clipart, and even image creation sites. Recently one of our teachers asked me in a workshop why I like blogging. This is why–through the power of reading someone’s blog, I discover a tool that I can […]
The things we carry forward
In January, when we began talking with our English 3AP teachers about a way to make their Vietnam Wall project more “reachable” online, the goal was to allow students who were reading The Things They Carried to retell the stories of those individuals whose names were listed on the Vietnam Wall. Now, our collaborative Vietnam Wall Experience project for English 3AP is almost completed, thanks to the efforts of many hands. (Thanks to the teachers, Becky Stucky, Sandra Coker, and Michelle Crocker, and Joel Adkins, our technology coordinator, Paula Murray, […]
A grand vision–the Encyclopedia of Life
An exciting new project has just been announced–the Encyclopedia of Life, which will be a worldwide clearinghouse encyclopedia for information about all life forms. Edmund Wilson conceived of it as a way to collect information about every organism on earth, and presented the idea, which was in the works, recently at an innovation conference called TED Talks. Within weeks, members of TED had jumped on board, collaborating to create a website for the project, donate photographs for the site, and even donating the url for the […]
Why not?
I was taking a second look at SlideShare this morning, which if you haven’t seen it, is like a professional’s “YouTube” for uploading powerpoint presentations. They are doing some creative things there, like holding a “world’s best presentation” contest, and letting users vote. (An aside– I noticed a version of Karl Fisch’s and Scott McLeod’s presentation, Did You Know, is entered in the competition with new graphics from J Brenman.) I was thinking about a post Joel Adkins (our campus technology coordinator) wrote recently, entitled TechTube. He was asking why […]
Writing a novel the “wiki” way
Penguin Books has just completed a fascinating project, at a millionpenguins.com,which was a collaborative novel written entirely by volunteers on a wiki site. As their introduction notes, “The buzz these days is all about the network, the small pieces loosely joined. About how the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. About how working together and joining the dots serves the greater good and benefits our collective endeavours. . . . However, is the same true in artistic fields? We are used […]