).Archive for the ‘lessons’ Category
My Wikispaces in Education Webinar Presentation Video is Up
Last week, Wikispaces invited me to give a Wikispaces in Education Webinar about four wiki projects I’ve done in high school English and history classes: The Broken World Wiki Textbook, a student-made textbook of modern world history from WW1 to WW2, featuring text, images, and embedded videos and student video lectures (and linked to a companion reflective class blog); the French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries, an historical fiction Writing-to-Learn unit in which student-created fictional characters interracted with their classmates’ characters in interlinked diary entries; King Lear Street Talk, a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, forcing the close line-by-line reading of 16th-century English necessary to adapt it to “Sopranos”-style modern English; and the 1001 Flat World Tales, a global creative writing workshop using the Six Traits of Effective Writing and a peer-reviewed Writing Workshop joining students from Hawaii, Colorado, and my classroom in Seoul.
The first three projects listed above were “local” collaborations, the fourth one global. I discuss in the webinar my thoughts on the relative merits of both approaches in the webinar. (I posted about those reflections most fully here.)
Thanks to Wikispaces for the opportunity to look back over two years of experiments in wiki pedagogy and introduce them all in one fell swoop.
If you want to read the “think-aloud” posts I wrote when designing these projects, check January to June or so of the Archives.
Here’s the event (it should start when I do, at almost 26:50, and finish a half hour later. The first 30 minutes are a tour of Wikispaces for beginners. The black blob on the screencast will disappear within a few seconds.):
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Creating Critical Readers: A Too-Easy Diigo-Google News-Student Blogging Project
Even if my recent “Politics Around the Web” posts have turned you off, I hope you noticed that they are a model of a very simple activity for any number of classes - current events, politics, science and math news, more - that want students to read and exhibit critical thinking about what they read. I say “simple” because all it takes is a Google News account, a Diigo account, and a blog.
This screencast shows you how it works, compliments of screencast-o-matic and Blip.tv:
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Join Me in Wikispaces’ First “Wikis in Education” Webinar Thursday Oct. 16
Update 1: Wikispaces recorded the webinar as a movie, and will send me the link when it’s up. I’ll post it here. I took the last half-hour of the 1-hour show to discuss 2 history wiki projects, and 2 language arts projects. Highly caffeinated and well-run good time (for me, anyway ).
).~
As the Wikispaces Blog announcement below states, I’ll be fielding questions about wikis in education on their first “Wikis in Education” webinar. (As it does not announce, I’ll also be questioning flat classrooms in comparison to local collaborations, which I prefer, in my own experience.)
Anyway, details below. Please join us, and share it with teachers curious about the use of wikis in language arts and history classrooms.
On October 16, we will be hosting our first Wikis in Education webinar. Come, ask us questions, and hear from other educators using wikis in their classrooms. We will highlight a Wikispaces feature, see how you can use it in your classroom, and hear from an educator about a recent wiki project.
Drop on in for the following:
- Get Introduced: We’ll run through the basics of setting up a wiki for your classroom.
- Notifications and Monitoring: We’ll show you how to use e-mail notifications, RSS feeds, and usage statistics to monitor the work of your students.
- Clay Burell and the 1001 Flat World Tales Project: Clay will speak about his Flat Classroom writing workshop and some wiki best practices he has learned from it.
Join us for the webinar on October 16 at 5pm PDT. You can register for the event at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/522719970. We look forward to meeting you and hearing your questions, experience, and feedback.
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A Great Idea for Drama Class: Performing Wasilla Town Meetings
This is just hilarious, and a brilliant idea at the same time: taking the Wasilla Town Meeting minutes (Sarah Palin presiding), and turning them into a one-man drama performance. Do yourself a favor and laugh as you learn about the extent of this woman’s experience, and worse yet, her leadership style.
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Teaching Political Scare and Smear Ads to Kids
Since schools, so often limited to teaching to the lowest common denominator of parental intelligence, can’t teach politics any more relevantly than they can teach religion, economics, biology, or anything else, the following video offers both a good argument for the importance of bucking this dumbing-down-for-fear trend, and a good approach to helping students view campaign ads critically:
With the McCain campaign’s announcement that it will heighten attacks on Obama’s character, and the Obama campaign’s decision to meet mud with mud instead of being Swift-boated a la Kerry ‘04, schools would be irresponsible if they didn’t try to equip students with the tools to understand how these things all work.
On a personal note, things may be quiet around here for a spell. I’m too interested in the elections and the economy to be able to write about much else right now (and by the way, these podcasts from This American Life, Part 1 here, Part 2 here, explain the economic crisis in a way that puts the mainstream media and both presidential candidates to shame, and are required listening for anybody wanting to understand the crisis - and they spread responsibility in a non-partisan way). I’m also busy with some projects that I hope will get a green light soon so I can share them, and with slowly getting back on stable footing domestically after my mother-in-law’s passing. So bear with me.
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