Archive for the ‘1001 Flat World Tales’ tag
1001 Flat World Tales: The Future (and Hello, Kazakhstan and Israel!)
I’ve been wishing aloud for some time that more non-Anglo countries would join the 1001 Flat World Tales project. So when Hagit from Israel (via my membership in ePals) and another teacher soon to begin work in Kazakhstan expressed interest in joining the project, you can imagine how happy that made me.
That brings the current list of participants to:
- Korea
- Denver
- Honolulu
- Hannibal, MO, USA
- New Brunswick, Canada
- Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
- Pennsylvania
- Two schools in Australia
- Shanghai, China
- Serbia
- Israel (fingers crossed)
- Kazakhstan (ditto)
Imagine the ‘07-’08 mix for this project. We can all change partners.
But where is the Arab world? The African? The Latin American? The West European?
Patience. This project is only two and a half months old.
(And now is a good time to throw your hat in for next year. Sign up at the 1001Teachers wiki, and we’ll take it from there.)
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1:1 Laptop Evaluations Compared to My Own Classroom Experiments
1-to-1 Computing :: A Measure of Success : February 2007 : THE Journal Annotated
WHEN TEXAS’ TECHNOLOGY IMMERSION PROJECT (TIP) began in the spring of 2004, a grant from the US Department of Education allowed a parallel project to launch— eTxTIP—to evaluate and measure the success of the program, which equips middle school students in high-risk, high-need areas with laptops.
“High-risk students” shouldn’t throw us off to the wider application of this research. Seen in a non-economic (class) sense, “high-risk” can apply also to students of sub-standard literacy scores on external, norm-referenced tests like the SAT and so forth. So this applies, I would argue, to any students whose academic literacy scores fall below the norm–which makes this especially relevant to international schools and schools with high numbers of non-native English speakers.
According to Givens, “The first-year report showed an increase in technical proficiency, engagement between the students and the teachers, a spike in parental involvement, and greater communication between the school and the home.” She says the second-year report is close to completion.
This is definitely true in my case regarding the “increase in. . . engagemennt between the students and the teachers,” though less so with parent involvement. I just sent a parent letter home with students explaining our web-logging “Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing Across the Years” program, and hope this will increase parent involvement.
Data is beginning to come in on several of the first 1-to-1 initiatives that were launched three or more years ago, an adequate time frame for obtaining measurable results. Just as expected, formal analysis shows that students are learning more through this new, collaborative instruction that opens the doors of communication and takes education beyond the classroom and into the community at large. Anecdotal success— accounts of positive transformations in the classroom from students, teachers, administrators, and parents—only serves to bolster the formal evaluations of these programs, which for most, were mandated when the programs were implemented.
Again, personal experience in our classroom collaboration with students in Denver and Honolulu bears out the claim that “students are learning more through this new, collaborative instruction that opens the doors of communication and takes education beyond the classroom and into the community at large.” While there are still improvements to be made in our method of collaboration–only natural, since this is our first attempt, and we’re learning as we go–the learning that is taking place is clearly richer, more authentic, and more multi-faceted than traditional, “walled classoom” writiing workshops of the past. It will only improve as we teachers continue working out the bugs.
The Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI), which began five years ago and provides each seventh-grade student in the state with a laptop, has also been undergoing evaluation, with two groups working in tandem to measure its success, says Bette Manchester, director of special projects for the Maine Department of Education. The first group, the Center for Education Policy, Applied Research, and Evaluation at the University of Southern Maine, looks at how the technology is being used, viewed, and accepted at the state’s middle schools. Among the findings, which can be found here, the CEPARE report states:
“There is a growing body of evidence that Maine’s Learning Technology Initiative is impacting teachers, students, and learning in many positive ways:
- Teachers are more effectively helping children achieve Maine’s state learning standards.
- Students are more motivated to learn, are learning more, and learning it more deeply.
- Students are acquiring 21st-century skills.
- The 1-to-1 laptop program is bringing about positive change in the acquisition of knowledge.”
Machester says the state continues to work with CEPARE to measure results at particular schools, noting that the center evaluates schools individually rather than the program as a whole. “We chose not to just look at statewide student achievement,” she says, “because that doesn’t tell the whole story. Plus, doing those types of assessments is very, very expensive.”
The biggest limitations to our own initiative are these:
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- students don’t have their own laptops, which limits intstruction to availability of laptop carts on any given day.
- the laptops the school provides do not contain the software required for optimal student production of digital work (frankly, the iLife audio, video, teleconferencing, and multimedia suite that comes with the MacBook)
- classroom time management is negatively affected by set-up and breakdown time to remove and return laptops to the carts every class.
- I include the rest of the article in case it has relevance for anyone else.
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Podcasting to Improve Writing
Real quick: for the 1001 Flat World Tales project, we had each writer record and podcast him/herself reading the first draft for an audience of one: him/herself (gender pronouns stink).
Podcasting for self-criticism. I know it’s not new, but it’s so easy now. And it seemed to help the young writers hear the parts of their writing that needed improvement. Here’s one student reflection:
The first thing came to my mind was that I had extremely simple and frequent grammar mistakes. I was kind of embarrassed when I heard it. Also, ideas and details sound incomplete and insights are shallow in depth; it was just shallow that proves not much thinking and brainstorming. I should work on ’showing’ since my second draft ‘told’ everything. It sounded like a lecture about Korean cultures. Well, it was embarrassing to listen to my own podcast anyways.
It’s all so easy now. Odeo, Podomatic. Students pick it up quickly, often without needing the teacher to know anything about it at all. How many teachers realize how easy it is to do this sort of thing?
Just thought it was worth a share.
(Photo credit: “EyePod (Revised)” by LeggNet on Flickr.)
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Greenwich Time / UTC: The Next Shift?
(Cross-posted from 1001 Reflections.)
Chris and Michele, I vote we all choose one Greenwich hour for revision deadlines and feedback deadlines. The initial confusion of learning to think in terms of a uniform “world time”–+9 for Seoul, -5 for Colorado (DST?), -8 for Hawaii–will clear itself up soon enough, and more than justify itself with the end of the deadline confusion and “false arrests” for “laziness” that I suspect we’re all experiencing.
Seems like we want four days for revision, and for two of them to bet Saturday and Sunday. So I say revision should be due Greenwich Monday 0900. That makes your local deadlines in the States past Sunday midnight.
Deadlines for feedback would be three days later: GMT 0900 Thursday.
We can translate that to our kids so they all know what time that is locally.
But the point, again, is that everybody around the world knows the deadlines are at the exact same minute, regardless of local time. (In the military we called it “Zulu” time, if I recall correctly.)
Other teachers, I strongly suggest you adopt the same policy. The deadline confusion causes unnecessary confusion and frustration. Learn from our experience and save yourselves a headache!
Thoughts?
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1001 Flat World Tales "Kudzu" Update: Five New Countries Enter New Workshops
Ms. Cofino posted an announcement that the first middle school (11-14 year-old, for non-Yanks) 1001 Flat World Tales global wiki writing workshop opened. One interesting spin-off for me was that I simply snooped into the wiki they set up for it, and saw so many improvements to my own wiki design for our current high school wiki that I see some major thievery coming in a future overhaul. Wonderful job, Ms. Cofino. When I read and watch you, I’m “Always Learning” too.
Again, real professional development just through watching each other work. Doesn’t happen very often in the physical school-building, but one click with a web 2.0 collaborative colleague takes me into her virtual classroom, where I’m watching and learning in an instant. The wows continue.
To add to that wow: Here’s how the Flat World Tales kudzu has grown in the two months since its inception:
- High school first workshop cycle: Seoul, Denver, Honolulu (in week 4, third revision)
- High school second workshop: Australia, Serbia, Shanghai (getting underway this week)
- Middle school first workshop: Malaysia, Serbia, Canada (now open)
- Elementary school first workshop: USA (Missouri), Dominican Republic (now open)
That’s classrooms in ten countries making connections, writing together, aiming toward authentic publication on the “blook”–all for nary a penny nor a conference, thanks to the read-write web and some tapped-in teachers. Talk about the “machine us/ing us.”
Go to the 1001 Reflections collaborating teachers blog for our exploration of how a “flat world faculty” team blog might help us and future participants. It’s still messy, but it’s far better than the neat boxes of the past, I think.
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