Category Archives: Networking

Labor Art

The Labor Art project was created after our eighth grade students finished reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. We wanted the students to use art, in this case poetry and songwriting to: raise awareness, inform the public, and inspire action on social issues. We wanted them to focus on the discrepancy between the haves and the have nots. We wanted them to take a close look at labor and class. Who builds the building we inhabit? Who profits? Who manufactures our goods? Who sews our clothes?

After doing research on global and local labor laws, human rights and working conditions the students will write a song or poem addressing the information they discovered. They will present these works live to the class and hopefully record a podcast for presentation on the wiki page. Although this project appears to be a writing assignment, the students are actually being assessed on their ability to use resources, sort information, and determine appropriateness of both sources and information.

The Benchmarks being assessed during the research phase are as follows:

• Use a variety of resource materials to gather information for a research topic
• Organize information and ideas from multiple sources in systematic ways
• Determine appropriateness of an information source for a research topic

1. We wanted the students themselves to prove that they have understood or completed each benchmark, so we asked them to use the levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy below to explain how they could show evidence that they could:

Knowledge: arrange, define, duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, state.

Comprehension: classify, describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select, translate,

Application: apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, solve, use, write.

Analysis: analyze, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, test.

Synthesis: arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set up, write.

Evaluation: appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose compare, defend estimate, judge, predict, rate, core, select, support, value, evaluate.

They were to make a series of instructions that they would carry out using the verbs form above. See student examples here at our wiki. We will also assess one writing and one presentation benchmark to be mentioned later.

The students were also asked to brainstorm essential questions they wanted to answer through their research. We again used Bloom’s Taxonomy to make sure they were critically looking at this entire process.

1. How effective are the questions you are trying to answer? Take a look at the list of questions you have brainstormed.

• Put them in order of most important to you to least.
• Label the questions using labels like political, class, personal etc…
• Review your list and identify five questions you would like to answer
• Explain why you think the answers to these questions will make for good material for a poem.

We are now starting our research and thinking about our poems. I have also been sharing a song or two which deals with social issues with them everyday. We have listened to Bob Dyaln, Bob Marley, and Rage Against the Machine so far.

Please comment on this blog post if you or your students have any insight or information about class and labor in your community that they can share with us. Perhaps we can invite them to edit our wiki with first hand accounts, pictures, or helpful websites . Maybe we can arrange a skype forum to discuss some of these issues.

I will be out of town for a week starting Thursday, but I am keen to involve some kind of collaboration when we get back.

What I Meant By Integrating Technology

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For the last week or so my brain has been on fire. In the classroom I am facilitating three very complicated, exhausting, yet rewarding projects with my students. One dealing with creating art, specifically poetry/songwriting to affect social change; the second is a standards-based, student-designed project, connecting the lessons learned from the fall of the Roman Empire to today’s world; and the third is a video project illustrating the similarities between raising plants from seeds and reading. I hope to have more complete descriptions of these projects on this site soon. To begin with, I only mention them, because in addition to running around my classroom like a crazy person, I have fully immersed myself back into the world of technology and education.

Furthermore, after several weeks of procrastination, I have finally completed my student blogging permission slips and sent them to my principal for approval; I have also spent every waking hour that I am not planning on Twitter, my Google Reader, and Skype. I have been building my network. Most importantly I have been reading blogs by, learning from, and talking to other teachers around the world. Being engrossed in this state of learning has me buzzing. I am constantly thinking about the information that is falling into my lap, by magic as it sometimes appears.

But let me get to my point; a few days ago while I was in this intellectual trance, I mentioned at a grade level meeting that I wasn’t satisfied with the level of conversation my small team was having about technology. I was so excited about the things I have been doing that it didn’t seem right that I couldn’t share them with the people I work closest with. I told them that I would love to be the go to guy, if they had any questions about using technology in their classrooms. I wasn’t any more sure what that meant than they did. I just wanted to be having the conversations I am having online with my peers.

Today, I received an email from a colleague asking me what I meant by integrating technology. I have been thinking about it all day, and now as I lay here in bed at 10 pm let me see if I can articulate my passion.

I cannot remember where I read it, so I cannot quote verbatim or link to the site, but in one of the many blogs I read someone said how they hate the term integration. The post stated that we should not be looking for ways to implement technology into our lessons for the sake of technology integration, but rather that technology should simply be the way we do business. It should be ingrained in our style of teaching.

So integrating technology does not mean using Power Point, creating videos, or even blogging. I see effectively using technology as a way to help students experiment with new tools to help them discover how to access, interpret, and use information not only from static web-based sources, but from interactive student-created networks. Will Richardson says, “One of our changing roles as teachers revolves around the idea that we are now connectors as much as content experts.”

Using student-created networks to search for knowledge seems crucial. The next step as I see it, is to empower students to synthesize their learning, create/produce work that reflects this synthesis , and redistribute the work back onto their network. I want to create a class full of Uploaders, students who are active participants in the exchange of ideas, information, and knowledge. I think Kim does a nice job of summing up my thoughts here.

As a lifelong learner myself, I am seeing the advantages of these network tools and concepts in my own learning and processing of information. Richardson goes on to say, “We who travel around evangelizing these technologies are for the most part simply trying to start some conversations, conversations that are going to be unique for every school, every community, every district. Nothing does that better than making our own practice transparent to the people in the room.”

By offering my services to my team, I was simply trying to start these conversations. I hope once I have my students blogging and my classroom connected, my students and my peers will start to see how I use my network as a model and become curious to see how it all works.

I think it is important to mention at this point that I am no expert. I am learning as I go along. But I feel that I have support from the people I interact with on the web. Imagine giving our stdnets that sense of support. So when we ask questions like what does technology in the classroom look like? I say, I don’t know. What should it look like? Let’s talk about it.

I agree with apophenia who says, “Stop fearing and/or fetishizing technology. Neither approach does us any good. Technology is not the devil, nor is it the panacea you’ve been waiting for. It’s a tool. Just like a pencil. Figure out what it’s good for and leverage that to your advantage. Realize that there are interface problems and figure out how to work around them to meet your goals. Tools do not define pedagogy, but pedagogy can leverage tools. The first step is understanding what the technology is about, when and where it is useful, and how it can and will be manipulated by users for their own desires.”

Without these conversations schools will not move forward. I have learned the hard way that you cannot instill a passion for new ideas if people are not open to learning them. In closing, I would like to end with a beautifully articulated paragraph from Ewan in his online debate at The Economist. He says, …technology in education is less about anonymous chips and bytes filling up our children with knowledge, less about teachers reinforcing a ‘chalk and talk’ style with an interactive whiteboard, and less about death by PowerPoint bullets. It’s more about helping learners become more world-aware, more communicative, learning from each other, understanding first hand what makes the world go.” around.

Let me repeat that:

It’s more about helping learners become more world-aware, more communicative, learning from each other, understanding first hand what makes the world go around.

I will use whatever tools are at my disposal to make that happen. What about you? Any ideas? Don’t be shy; leave a comment. Let the conversations begin.

All a Twitter

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I never thought writing a blog post would be the easiest and most relaxing thing I would do all night. A few days ago, I felt disconnected and afraid that I was falling behind the Classroom 2.0 world, and so I started a blog. Since then I have joined Twitter, sign onto three Nings and haven’t looked back.

As I was in a networking frenzy while eating my dinner in the kitchen, I stepped back for a second and was amazed at how many things I was doing at once; how many people I was talking with; and how many ideas were brewing.

Here is a brief re-cap of my night. I still feel an adrenalin high from all of my activity:

I was listening to a podcast from Betchablog, while Tweeting and emailing Mr. Mayo about connecting our two Global Issues classes. I was told to join The Global Education Collaborative by Lucy Grey, which I did. I embedded a slideshow from her page onto our Global Issues blog, a perfect fit. I added a few widgets here and there, extended by blogroll and added a few new Skype contacts, and cleaned out my google reader folders.

All in all, not a bad night. Now I am off to read some Gore Vidal and perhaps watch a few shows with my wife. I am re-connected and excited to see what people have to say tomorrow.

If words like Twitter and Ning sound like a foreign language to you, they don’t have to. Until a few days ago, I didn’t know a thing about them either, but they are so easy that I already cannot remember how I lived without them.

Fellow teachers at ASD, let me know if you are interested in any of this.