1001 Tales update: Messy, but moving; and ePals update: Walls coming down!

Friday, 16 February 2007 Clay Burell Print This Post

Colorado students in Michele’s class and Seoul students in mine have now posted their “about me” blurbs and their first drafts on the wiki.

Michele and I skyped last night–first time with voice, thank god, instead of chatting, since Michele finally got a microphone and headset (10 bucks)–and planned the next stages:

assigning cross-world peers for writing workshop responses to each draft
designing the peer response question template each student will use to improve his/her peer’s story
working out the revision schedule (peer responses due each Tuesday/Wednesday, revisions based on those due each Friday/Saturday; peer responses on each revision due by the following Tuesday/Wednesday). So we’ve got our writing workshop and process cycle banged out.

Michele and I also took Jeff Whipple‘s nudge to open the project up to multiple intelligences by inviting student illustrators, actors, oral interpreters, and so forth to enhance the project with their own skills. So we will be looking at art, video, podcasts, and so forth down the road.

Chad is snowed under in Canada; Ms. C ofino in Malaysia (not Arabian, but at least Islamic!) needs three weeks to get her middle school students on board. Others will be coming in downstream when their schedules allow (again, it’s a never-ending project, since wikis don’t close and it’s not hard to coordinate with another school somewhere to coordinate the collaboration). And…

ePals and I are problem-solving, so maybe Serbia can play after all.

I’m happy about this. I asked ePals to reconsider their restrictions, they seem to have forwarded my criticism to a higher-up, and the higher-up wrote me a very nice email agreeing that ePals should allow teachers to meet, then migrate outside the ePals walls. She invited me to share my email address, wiki URLs, and so forth with any interested teachers on the ePals forum

So happy ending. Good on ePals for “tearing down those walls” and breaking Big Brother’s kneecaps.

And I just burned my fried rice dinner because of this post.

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