I have long wanted to teach students all the amazing things I have learned while blogging. Recently, I have gotten the opportunity to change my curriculum in my Advanced Computer Applications class. I am now calling the Advanced Computer Applications” class the “21st Century Skills” class.
As an opener I played the class a video created by Mike Wesch and his students “Vision of Students Today”. I was hoping that this would be a great eye opener for the kids and to get them thinking about their daily activities interacting on the Web.
Once I am home and have access to Youtube I will embed the video.
The class has only been meeting for one week. So far we have created Netvibes accounts, a twitter account and have subscribed to Weblogg-ed, The Thinking Stick, and The Fischbowl.
I will have the kids also subscribe to this blog as well so they can have insight to my thought process and how I learn. I actually have debated creating a separate blog just for the class, but I want it to be authentic and not contrived. The beauty of this class is that we meet everyday so we can discuss much in class instead of just using my blog as a directing medium, I will use it for modeling.
Now to the good stuff, today ’s assignment was to read Will Richardson’s post on the Obama speech, and the first 20 comments, and to THINK.
I have to admit I was nervous, I have never taught a course like this and I was worried that I would have to pry responses out of them. I was very pleasantly surprised. Let me preface this with the fact that we were not in school during President Obama’s speech. So, this was a non-issue for my district.
The students were directed to look for the “Lens” of Will Richardson, and to find the focus of the controversy.
All the observations were great. I even got comments along the lines of “fear limiting what schools can teach”, some of my students started Googling the debate while we were discussing it, which I totally encourage. The point of the exercise was to have my students think out loud about the post and its comments. One of the things I said to them was
“When I say things like: Where did that come from?, or I don’t know what he/she is talking about. I am thinking out loud for you, I want you to know how I think about these things, and so you become a student of your own thought process. I am not openly disagreeing with the post or the comments, I am just trying to make myself think on them and then I will follow links, think and learn.”
One of the best observations came from Simone who when reading one of the comments said, (I am paraphrasing)
“The more schools are limited, the less we will learn. School already does not prepare us for life, it is only about academics, not life.”
Just gives me more to think about…