Beyond School

Pageflakes - your free student and teacher start page

• I am a complete idiot for not reading Will Richardson religiously. Pageflakes for students and teachers is powerful stuff.
  - post by cburell

Weblogg-ed » Using Pageflakes as Student Portal

• A gem from Will Richardson on classroom use of Pageflakes. I see a migration coming.
  - post by cburell

Extracurricular :: For technologists who do their homework : July 2007 : THE Journal

• From the article:

  The benefits of integrating technology into K-12 education are being demonstrated nationwide. Here is an illustration of the quantitative impact Texas’ Technology Immersion Pilot has had on the Floydada Independent School District. - post by cburell

Borderland » Blog Archive » Teaching the Controversy

• Note the “habits of mind” approach to ‘teaching the controversy” instead of “indoctrinating.”
  - post by cburell

[Cross-posted from 1001 Reflections]

Terry Smith of Hannibal, Missouri, USA, Jeff Dungan of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and I (in Seoul, Rep. of Korea), have a “virtual faculty meeting” to plan the first elementary school writing workshop for the 1001 Flat World Tales Project.

It was the most efficient team meeting I think I’ve ever had. Length: 20 minutes.

(Download to iTunes to see extended podcast Chapter Markings.)

Click here to get your own player.

Jane Nicholls, a grade 5-6 teacher from Pine Hill School in New Zealand, popped into my inbox this morning expressing interest in writing around the world in the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki / “blook” project. I checked out her very impressive website (another teacher to flatter through thievery of her ideas and approaches!) and can’t wait to see where this all goes.

“Problem”: Jane’s learners are grade 5 and 6, mine are grade 9.
Solution: Open it up. There’s no reason other grade 5 and 6 classrooms can’t climb into the wiki and collaborate with other world classrooms there. In short, the project is now open, K-12. We can fine-tune as we go.

I’ve already invited my KIS grade 5 colleague to partner with Jane, and he’s game. So more to come. And the door’s open. Think of the learners’ experience, and ask yourself: why not join?

Below are some videos of the first meeting with teachers at my school who volunteered to join our “21st Century Literacy Cadre”–and note the intentional omission of the word “technology” from this title, since it’s not about the technology, which is only the means.

My Audacity recording didn’t work, so no podcast. (”Learning is messy,” he hummed. “Next time.”)

So all we’ve got is video, and the quality even there should have been better (tighter camera zoom on LCD screen, e.g.). But the audio is fine. Listen to it like a podcast and forget the video part.

I’ll embed the rest of the meeting as I make time to capture and upload it. A day or two. The meeting lasted an hour and 45 minutes. I’ll post it in 30 minute clips.

Besides the bad hair–who has time for a haircut?–the most embarrassing thing about this meeting is how much I talked. All I can say is that it seemed a necessary evil, until these new possibilities, tools, and buzzwords are a common knowledge base for the whole cadre. Then the collaborative dialogs will start!

As usual, comments are welcome and collaboration from educators outside of my school begged

Part 1, below: Welcome. Positivity vital for a cadre. Demystifying the jargon: RSS, feeds, aggregators, blogs, podcasts, wikis. (28 minutes)

More to come–check back soon (or subscribe with Bloglines and save yourself the trouble) for more video.

This morning blogging before work habit is going to make me late for class one of these days, but you have to strike while the iron’s hot. So real quick:

If we can’t find RSS feeds for elementary students to read–not a foregone conclusion, mind you, as this, and this, and especially this show–it’s always possible to remedy that by simply creating them.

Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” might be put to work by having, within one school, each grade level writing blogs, and having students in each grade level subscribe to the blogs of their same-age peers, plus the blogs of the students one grade above them.

That way, first graders are being read by kindergarteners, second graders by first graders, etc, on up the chain. It would be a way of “preteaching” vocabulary and sentence structures one grade level above that of each reader.

Blogging assignments could get more interesting still by having students consciously write for their “-1″ audiences–using pictures, videos, podcasts to provide non-written context clues and input for their younger readers.

Notice, again, how this brings the subject of textbooks back into question, and possibly demotes them yet again.

Thoughts?