As a follow up to the series Stepping it Up: Learning About Blogs FOR your Students, I would like to crowdsource more samples of blog posts and comments for teachers to practice recognizing, evaluating and assessing various levels of quality work.

A meme might be a good way to get the ball rolling.

Wikipedia defines a Meme as:

A meme  is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.

Quality Blogging and Commenting Audit Meme

In order to gather more audit samples from a large variety of age groups and authors, I challenge you to publish a blog post with a post or comment audit.

1. Select a blog post or blog comment to audit (Professional or Student)
2. Take a screenshot or copy and past the post or comment into your blog post (be sensitive whether you want to reveal any names or references)
3. Include or link to the rubric you use to assess the quality of post or comment
4. Audit the post or comment by describing your train of thought regarding the level of quality you would assess your chosen post or comment
5. Suggest how you would coach the author of audited post or comment to improve
6. Tag (at least) three educators and challenge them to audit a post or comment
7. Leave a comment with the link to your audit post on Langwitches

If you have not been tagged, please feel free to jump in, write and link your own audit blog post.

I am tagging Andrea Hernandez, Maggie Hos-McGrane, Nancy von Wahlde, Edna Sackson, Linda Yollis, Kathleen Morris, Kim Cofino

Looking forward to their quality blogging audits

Curriculum21 is looking for contributors to their Clearinghouse.

The Clearninghouse showcases selected resources for all subject areas, grade levels, Common Core Standards, Global Education, Professional Development and many more categories.

To contribute a link is easy:

1. Go to Curriculum 21 Clearinghouse

2. Register

3. Fill out your registration

4. Once logged in, click on the “Submit Link” button

5. Fill out the resource by entering a title, description and choose from an available category. Then click “Save”.

Once submitted, the link will be reviewed by a Curriculum21 team member before it gets approved and becomes visible for everyone.

Thank you for taking the time in collaborating to create this unique resource for educators from around the world.

If you are looking to weave global awareness & collaboration into your elementary school classroom, consider participating in the

Teddy Bears Around the World Project

For the forth year, Teddy Bears from around the world are contributing images about their travels, traditions and customs to this blog.

Currently, there are contribution from the following categories:

About the Project:

Teddy Bears Around The World started as a project with a school mascot called Jose,  the travel bear, who enjoyed roaming the world, getting to know new places and meeting interesting people. The Teddy Bears Around the World blog provides the space to hang out and communicate with different teddy bears around the world to hear more about their lives and adventures. This will allow our students to see each other’s countries, customs and traditions through the eyes of our teddy bears and open their horizons through a more global perspective.
The idea is to have an ongoing exchange (no deadlines, no pressure) to contribute stories, photographs, videos or podcasts.

These contributions can be from the teddy bears point of view or from the students’ point of view telling a story ABOUT their teddy bear. We could have seasonal posts or specific story starters, such as:

• Teddy celebrates Thanksgiving in USA (other country specific holidays)
• Teddy is going to the movies
• Teddy’s Eve tradition
• Teddy and his favorite foods
• Teddy looses his first tooth
• Teddy watches TV
• Teddy’s favorite fairy tale
• Teddy celebrates his birthday
• Christmas trees around the world

There is no need to send a Teddy Bear to another school or teacher. All you need to do in order to participate is to register via the Contact Form, integrate writing and documenting (via images, videos or audio) the adventures of your own class’ teddy bear.

• Fill out the form.
• You will be contacted (at the e-mail you supply in the form) to submit an image of your Teddy Bear.
• Once the image has been submitted and has been approved, it will be placed on the Teddies of the World Gallery Page and a placemark will be created on the Where in the World Map.
• You will then receive a username and password for this blog to upload your own posts AND that allow your class to comment on other teddy bear’s posts.
• Your posts could be about life in your part of the world. They could include traditions, holidays, day to day life , school events, etc.

So how about it? Are you an elementary school teacher who wants to get involved in a project that practices:

• writing skills?
• media skills?
• collaboration skills?
• geography?

and exposes your students to

• local & community awareness?
• global awareness?
• being globally connected?

Should Teachers Be More Like Conductors? This bog post from 2009 took me to the following TED talk by Itay Talgam.

Although I am not a musician, nor listen to much classical music, I was mesmerized. This TED talk was geared towards organization leaders, but I so agree with Tania Sheko, that it seemed to directly speak to me as an educator.

Click to enlarge image

I am quoting the following passages that made the connection to teaching and the classroom for me:

The magical moment, the magical moment of conducting. Which is, you go on to a stage. There is an orchestra sitting. They are all, you know, warming up and doing stuff. And I go on the podium. You know, this little office of the conductor. Or rather a cubicle, an open-space cubicle, with a lot of space. And in front of all that noise, You do a very small gesture. Something like this, not very pomp, not very sophisticated. And suddenly, out of the chaos, order. Noise becomes music.

Carlos Kleiber clip:

But what about the conductor? What can you say the conductor was doing, actually? He was happy. [...] he’s spreading happiness. And I think the happiness, the important thing is this happiness does not come from only his own story, and his joy of the music. The joy is about enabling other people’s stories to be heard at the same time.

You have the story of the orchestra as a professional body. You have the story of the audience as a community. Yeah. You have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience. And then you have other stories, unseen. People who build this wonderful concert hall. People who made those Stradivarius, Amati, all those beautiful instruments. And all those stories are being heard at the same time. This is the true experience of a live concert.

Richard Strauss clip:

Did you see him turning pages in the score? Now, either he is senile, and doesn’t remember his own music, because he wrote the music. Or he is actually transferring a very strong message to them, saying, “Come on guys. You have to play by the book. So it’s not about my story. It’s not about your story. It’s only the execution of the written music, no interpretation.” Interpretation is the real story of the performer. So, no, he doesn’t want that. That’s a different kind of control.

Herbert von Karajan clip:

[The players] look at Karajan. And then they look at each other.  [...] And after doing that, they really look at each other, and the first players of the orchestra lead the whole ensemble in playing together.

And when Karajan is asked about it he actually says, “Yes, the worst damage I can do to my orchestra is to give them a clear instruction. Because that would prevent the ensemble, the listening to each other that is needed for an orchestra.” [...] Meaning that you know you have no authority to change anything. It’s my music. The real music is only in Karajan’s head. And you have to guess my mind. So you are under tremendous pressure because I don’t give you instruction, and yet, you have to guess my mind. So it’s a different kind of, a very spiritual but yet, very firm control.

Carlos Kleiber clip 2:

I’m opening a space for you to put in another layer of interpretation. That is another story. But how does it really work together if it doesn’t give them instructions? It’s like being on a rollercoaster. Yeah? You’re not really given any instructions. But the forces of the process itself keep you in place. That’s what he does. The interesting thing is of course the rollercoaster does not really exist. It’s not a physical thing. It’s in the players heads.

And that’s what makes them into partners. You have the plan in your head. You know what to do, even though Kleiber is not conducting you. [...] And you become a partner building the rollercoaster with sound, as you actually take the ride. This is very exciting for those players. [...] It is very tiring. Yeah? But it’s the best music making, like this.

Carlos Kleiber clip 3:

What happens when there is a mistake?

Again you see the beautiful body language.  And now there is a trumpet player who does something not exactly the way it should be done. Second time for the same player.  And now the third time for the same player. When it’s needed, the authority is there. It’s very important. But authority is not enough to make people your partners.

Carlos Kleiber clip 4:

Kleiber not only creates a process, but also creates the conditions in the world in which this process takes place. So again, the oboe player is completely autonomous and therefore happy and proud of his work, and creative and all of that. And the level in which Kleiber is in control is in a different level. So control is no longer a zero-sum game. You have this control. And all you put together, in partnership, brings about the best music. So Kleiber is about process. Kleiber is about conditions in the world.

Lenny Bernstein clip:

You need to have process and content to create the meaning. [...] Lenny Bernstein always started from the meaning [...]  you can see the music on his face. You can see the baton left his hand. No more baton. Now it’s about you, the player, telling the story. Now it’s a reversed thing. You’re telling the story. And even briefly, you become the storyteller to which the community, the whole community, listens to. And Bernstein enables that. Isn’t that wonderful?

I am preparing a pre-conference workshop for Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston at the end of the month. The title of my workshop is: Orchestrating the Collaborative Classroom

Collaboration is one of the most sought after skills in the 21st century. How do you transform your classroom into a collaborative community where each student is empowered to contribute and to take ownership of their learning? How do you become the conductor of an orchestra full of “unique instruments and musicians”?

This session will share examples from the classroom where students take on “jobs” to become part of that orchestra. We will look at and play with different “instruments” that are uniquely tailored to encourage collaborative work. Participants will explore how they can use classroom time as rehearsals in order to prepare their students for a 21st century concerto.

I think snippets from the above video will spur some great conversations…

This is the follow up post of the survey results I shared in “Do Student Jobs in the Classroom Affect Learning?”

The concept of the Digital Learning Farm is based on Alan November’s work.

Years ago, when farms dominated our landscape, children were responsible for performing meaningful jobs that were vital to each family’s success. Depending on their age, children would care for animals, repair farm equipment, prepare food to sell at local markets and more. Children were essential to the very survival of the family. At the same time, these jobs taught children the value of hard work, leading them to become more productive citizens within their communities as adults. [...]

If our children are to grow up to make important contributions to our society,it is essential that we provide them with powerful tools and experiences across the curriculum. This will require a new culture of teaching and learning that engages students as contributors.

The Digital Learning Farm

I have taken Alan’s call to engage students as contributors to heart. Coupled with the desire to put learning, not passing quizzes and exams, at the heart of a classroom learning community, I keep 21st century skills, literacies and Digital Learning Farm’s roles to empower our learners in mind at all times.

Mr. Curran outlines on his Classroom Blog of Room 302, the different teams and responsibilities his students participate in each week. I love the thought that went into setting his teams up and by the look of his blog the consistency he integrated the roles into his classroom (instead of being a one-time project).

• Official Scribes–Each week the official scribes take notes on the things we are reading and learning. They post these notes to an internet page that everyone can view if they want to review what we’ve been doing.
• Global Collaboration Team–This team is in charge of making contact with classrooms around the globe. They will be emailing other teachers and classes, trying to make as many contacts world-wide as possible. They will also be managing any projects that we’re working on with other classes. Finally, they’ll be keeping track on several maps so that we have a record of where the schools and people we’ve contacted live. Oh, and they’ll have a blog they have to post to, too!
• Society Contribution Team–This team will select a fundraising project to work on. To do this, they will use the website www.kiva.org. Kiva is a site set up for donors to locate projects around the globe to help to fund. (e.g. building a school in a poor town in Africa, etc.) Once they choose a project to help, they’ll manage the fundraising. Oh, and they’ll blog about it, too.
• Research Team--We have a class of curious thinkers. And they have lots and lots of questions. Every week, the Research Team will collect our questions and post them to our class “Wonderwall.” Then they will help find the answers to those questions. They’ll also be given certain research tasks along the way to complete so that they build their research skills.
• Learning Documentary Producers–Each week this team will produce a “learning documentary” of all the things we’ve learned about and done during those school days. They’ll produce a podcast and post it to the web so that everyone can see the exciting things we work on from week-to-week.

The following are references to websites and blog posts that show The Digital Learning Farm concept with its roles to empower student learners in action.

Ethical Treatment of Animals (7th Grade)- Contributors to Society, Researchers, Collaboration Coordinators, Curriculum Reviewers

7th graders wanted to learn and understand how humans in our society treat animals today. To gather the information, they interviewed two veterinarians and representatives of different associations and local businesses concerning their research. They hope that the people that take the time to read their website will benefit from the information and then pass it along to another person. Their  hope is that their research will help inspire people to treat animals with respect and understanding.

Navigating our Classsroom Blog Tutorial (2nd Grade)- Tutorial Designers

After the classroom teachers started to use a classroom blog as the primary means of communication between school and home, the importance of teaching parents how to navigate the new blog environment. Second grade students took it upon themselves to create a video tutorial for their parents explaining to them the basic blog vocabulary and navigataion of their classroom blog.

Quality Commenting (3rd Grade)- Tutorial Designers, Collaboration Coordinators, Contributors to Society

The first Seminole Swamp Morning Show. Students interviewed several bloggers of our school community to learn about quality commenting. They formulated questions, storyboarded, wrote scripts and recorded a news show to share with the world.

Jacksonville: For Kids by Kids (3rd Grade)- Collaboration Coordinators, Contributors to Society, Curriculum Reviewers

As part of their unit about “Our Community”, students wrote a script and recorded a video to suggest places to visit and things to do in Jacksonville, Florida. Recommendations for kids by kids.

Jacksonville Reads (3rd Grade)- Collaboration Coordinators, Contributors to Society

In the third installment of the Seminole Swamp Morning Show, students interviewed members of our city’s community regarding their reading habits and their favorite childhood books. From the mayor of Jacksonville, a police officer, a chef, a 100-year old man to the city’s baseball team’s mascot.

Math Tutorial Designers (4th Grade)- Tutorial Designers, Contributors to Society, Curriculum Reviewers

We asked our students to create a tutorial explaining multiplication to peers, future fourth graders of our school, etc. We started out with a lesson on Becoming good Tutorial Designers to show them examples of tutorial design techniques as well as to give them an understanding of the importance of clear and precise step by step directions.

Florida Explorers (4th Grade)- Researchers, Official Scribe

4th graders created a storybook, using Mixbook , where students contributed different parts from a common storyline. Students collaboratively worked on ideas for a possible storyline and how each explorer would be represented and how groups would be able to research and contribute their portion of a story.

Christopher Columbus Creates 21st Century Explorers (5th Grade) Researchers, Contributors to Society, Curriculum Reviewers, Collaboration Coordinators, Official Scribe

Follow along an “upgrade” process from textbook to globally connected learning. Students connect via email, face-to-face interviews, online surveys, Twitter and Skype with people from around the world to learn about different perspectives of one historic figure. They research, analyze and share their learning in a

Facebook Pages for American Revolution & American Revolution Myths (5th Grade) Researchers

Students showed their research and knowledge about historic figures of the American Revolutionby creating a fake facebook profile page. Since the students are under the age of 13, they created them offline in a PowerPoint slide, which we later uploaded to their classroom blog. In addition to the Facebook pages, the class  created a Snopes- Urban Legends inspired video. What myths about the American Revolution could they debunk? Students used the a range of programs (their choice)  to produce a short intro video

It’s About Learning Style and Collaboration (5th Grade) Official Scribe, Researchers

5th graders experiment with different types of note taking as part of creating “Official Scribes” for the classroom while taking into account the students’ different learning styles. From individual note taking with paper and pencil, individual note taking on a word processor, collaborative backchanneling to visual note taking (on SmartBoard and paper)

Tutorial Designers- Empowered Learners- Contributors (5h Grade) Tutorial Designers

We divided a 5th grade class into two groups (Quantity vs. Quality) and asked them to create a Grammar tutorial/practice for “Contractions” with the SmartBoard notebook for the first graders of our school. The Quantity group had to create as many separate tutorial/practice slides as possible, while the other group was told only to turn in ONE slide with a perfect tutorial/practice.

Taking Notes- Summarizing Information (2nd Grade) Official Scribe

2nd graders are learning about different communities. As they are watching a video they are learning to take notes in different ways. From paper, pencil and clipboard to “screenshooting” visuals that will be organized and categorized in a Venn Diagram.

Backchanneling-Movie Watching-Note Taking-Information Scribes (Middle School) Official Scribe

Middle School students watch a movie about copyright as they are using Today’s Meet as a backchannel tool. Collaboratively they create the “perfect notes”, then review the content by formatting, editing and organizing the information.

Take a look at these third graders who are creating their own “textbooks” on LiveBinder (3rd Grade) Curriculum Reviewers, Contributors to Society

Michael Thornton decided to have his students create their own “textbooks” using Livebinders.  ” The class and I go over the curriculum and/or standards.  We discuss what it is they are expected to learn.  Now armed with that knowledge, they find websites that fulfill what is expected of them.  In addition, they search for websites that engage, enlighten and enrich their learning.    This year my students created four unit “textbooks”.  I am going to continue this process with my new students next year.  In addition, these current textbooks are adaptable and will change with time.  This was a specific request from my students.”

If you have written about or documented “The Digital Learning Farm” in action, please leave a link in the comments. It is important to gather examples and resources to model for others.

I am honored to be able to cross-post Stephen Wilmarth’s blog post below on Langwitches.
If you are interested to read more about Steve’s International Experimental program at the Number One Middle School in Wuhan, China take a look at:

• Take a Peek into China’s First 1:1 iPad Class
• Learning…Young Chinese Perspective
• Bringing a 1:1 iPad Program to China

by Stephen Wilmarth
China has a problem.  It will soon become, if it isn’t already, the largest English speaking country in the world.

This is the result of English being a mandatory subject for every student who graduates from high school and goes on to a university.  The Chinese national college entrance exam, known as the GaoKao, consists of nearly 25% English language related questions, including English grammar, English vocabulary, English sentence structure, and English reading passages.  And the GaoKao is the only criteria used to select students for China’s most prestigious universities.  So, every public high school in China is focused on teaching students English as a second language.  It is a national priority and a national obsession.  In this heated environment, the teaching of language takes center stage.  Questions abound.  Is the teaching of English being effectively accomplished in China?  Why are so many English learners, who score well in English sections on all-or-nothing tests like the GaoKao, unable to “function” in English?  Can an emphasis on the “test” really be a successful strategy for learning a second language that is as different from the Chinese native tongue as English and Mandarin are?

The evidence that the conflict between the “test” and the “need” is not very promising for the current system of teaching methods.  But closing the gap between the need for Chinese students to score high on the GaoKao, while achieving better results in using English in professional and daily transactions with foreigners, does not have an easy or clear answer.

In my own boot-strapping attempt to improve the teaching of English for my students at the International Experimental Class, I’ve made a choice to try and give students a much wider range of active learning options.  I can do this because I’m not bound by the system to prepare my students for higher education in a Chinese institutions.  My students are all focused on going to a university abroad, predominantly to the US.

I offer the following project as an example of one of the kinds of methods that we’re trying.  Observe these artifacts and make your own judgement.  Give me your feedback.  I’m interested in improving the outcome and the methods for achieving better results in language learning.

The Project Description:

A class of 45 students at my school in China were matched up with a class of 20 students at the All Saints Catholic Girls College (high school) in Liverpool (Sydney), Australia.

Each class broke up into teams to make a total of 6 short movies per class – 6 movies made by our Chinese students, and 6 movies produced by the Australian students.  These movies were storyboarded, scripted, filmed, directed, and produced strictly by the students.

The final versions were then stripped of soundtracks – music, dialogue, and sound effects, and the silent versions were exchanged between the schools.  The students were then asked to put their own soundtracks – music, dialogue, and sound effects, into the exchanged silent films.

The culmination of the project is to share both the original versions with sound and the updated versions with sound from the other class.  Students are then asked to analyze the films for cultural, language, and creative differences.

I’ll offer some examples of the work here.  I’m interested in finding “evidence” of learning.  How does making a movie, including storyboarding, scripting, filming, directing, and producing help to improve language and communication skills?  Is there evidence here that language teaching objectives are being met?

This is a clip produced by students at the No. 1 High School Affiliated with Central China Normal University.  The clip is titled “Hide & Seek.”  This first sample is a complete production with sound.

This next version is the same clip, but stripped of all sound, which was passed along to the students in Australia.  It’s now their job to create their own sound track for this video clip.

Here’s one of the versions returned by the students from Australia, with their own “script.”  This is titled “Hide & Seek” by Jennifer, Shalona and Ashmita.

This next clip, titled “Recurring,” turned out to be of great interest to the students in Australia.  It’s dark overtones and desire to “turn back the clock” in order to get a second chance, seems to be a strong theme among students.

Here’s the original version with sound.

Here’s the stripped version without sound.

And here’s one of the versions, titled “Recurring” by Cindy, that were returned by the Australian students, with their own sound track.

Here’s another clip produced by students at the No. 1 High School Affiliated with Central China Normal University.  The clip is titled “Friendship.”

Again, this “theme” seems to run strong in students in every culture.

Finally, here are the remaining clips, with sound tracks, produced by the students at the No. 1 High School Affiliated with Central China Normal University.

“IMAGINE FLYING” by Aqua Group

“Angel Beats” by Grape Group

“A Story About a Dog” by Lime Group

In all cases, I think this project demonstrates to me, at least, that there are common themes that interest teenagers everywhere.  I also think this work shows the strong influences of global “macro” cultures.
I’d be interested in feedback on this project.  This is but one of many projects we’ve run this year, using multi-media channels to help students build a better working knowledge in foreign language and use their creative energies to express complex ideas and feelings.

As promised here is the follow up video to the trailer from my previous post Bringing a 1:1 iPad Program to China. I am back in the US now and am trying to sort through and make connections to my experiences from the past 2 weeks.

Taking videos and pictures while we were traveling in China… has helped me tremendously in reflecting on these experiences. Choosing the right images (from over 1000 files between Mike and my Flickr account) and then editing the movie was an integral part of my learning experience.

1:1 iPad Initiative in Wuhan, China from langwitches on Vimeo.

What are your thoughts when viewing the video? What parallels can you draw to education in the US? What implications do you see for the global future of our students?

Here is another post in the series of showing Alan November’s Digital Learning Farm: Students as Contributors in Action.

Previously I have posted about

• Tutorial Designers- Empowered Learners- Contributors
• Taking Notes- Summarizing Information- 2nd Grade Style
• Backchanneling-Movie Watching-Note Taking-Information Scribes

Today I wanted to share our experimentation with different types of note taking as part of creating “Official Scribes” for the classroom while taking into account the students’ different learning styles.

Students were starting a unit about the American Revolution by watching an introductory video clip. We discussed different ways to take notes and came up with:

• individual note taking by paper and pencil
• individual note taking on a word processor
• collaborative backchanneling
• visual note taking (on SmartBoard and paper)

As the video was playing, one student was in charge of pausing it when a visual was displayed that he felt was an important visual to describe what was happening.

Once paused we used the SmartBoard notebook tool of taking a screenshot and importing it into a notebook slide. After the movie was over, the class sorted through the images and discussed which ones would stay and which ones could be deleted.

We then used a timeline from the notebook gallery and copied and pasted the appropriate screenshots onto the timeline.

I had shown a few minutes of the RSAnimated TED talk “Changing Educational Paradigms” with Ken Robinson to the students. The reason for showing it was for the drawing technique used and how the illustration captured what Robinson was talking about in a visual way. I was very surprised to see how “into it” the students got. They did not want to stop watching it. I am pretty sure that these ten year olds were not interested in Robinson’s message…

Drawing/Illustrating Notes

Visual Notes

Several students volunteered to wo(man) the backchannel on Today’s Meet. They are pretty sufficient in the process by now. They set up their own room, summarize what it happening in the classroom and then “clean up” the backchannel log (which is then shared as a Google Doc).

In Florida, the fourth grade curriculum calls for students to learn about the explorers of the 15th and 16th century who came to its coast and influenced the history of the state. As the teachers and I were sitting together to plan the upgrade of the unit, we looked at the instructional goals, standards and objectives, reminded ourselves of 21st century skills and literacies we wanted to incorporate into the lessons for students to be exposed to, practice and “live and breathe”.

I shared with Mrs. R. the Explorer Mixbook project I had co-taught with a teacher from another school. We decided to also create a storybook, using Mixbook again, where students contributed different parts from a common storyline. In contrast to the previous project the story would be a narrative fiction with historical facts intertwined instead of a non fiction book. During one class, students collaboratively worked on ideas for a possible storyline and how each explorer would be represented and how groups would be able to research and contribute their portion of a story.

Brainstorming a storyline

Students started getting their creative juices flowing and kept coming up with more and more ideas to add to the list. Excitement in the class grew larger by the minute. The classroom teacher saved the notebook page with the ideas jotted down as an image and uploaded it to their classroom blog. She extended the brainstorming session by asking her students to add their storyline ideas as comments to the blog post. The class would vote on a final storyline once back in class. Here are a few comments:

Collaboratively writing the introduction and conclusion

Students then started their research about their assigned explorers. They also looked for creative commons or public domain images that they could upload and use for their storybook. Once found, they uploaded the images to Mixbook. For a step by step tutorial how to use Mixbook, take a look at the following chapter of my Digital Storytelling book.

Uploading Public Domain images to Mixbook

Students took turns to create and design the layout of their individual pages and then inserted and formatted the appropriate images and text.

Layout & Text Entry

Upgrade to 21st Century Skills

Upgrade to 21st Century Literacies

Upgrade to Digital Learning Farm based on Alan November

| View Sample Photo Books | Create your own Photo Book

We are intensifying the quest to empower our learners by allowing the students to become contributors to their classroom learning community. Our model is Alan November’s six roles he outlines in The Digital Learning Farm.

One of these roles is The Tutorial Designer.

Alan asks :

“Who do students go to when they are having difficulties completing a homework assignment?”

Most of them will call a friend to explain to them what to do. By taking advantage of how students often understanding something better or are more willing to listen when a peer explains something, the idea of becoming tutorial designers comes in.

Not only will the student watching/listening to the tutorial benefit, but also the student creating the tutorial will benefit by breaking their own knowledge into smaller pieces and teaching it to someone else.

Students don’t seem to be natural tutorial designers.How were we going to approach teaching good tutorial design to 4th graders?

I was in luck! Kim Cofino just happened to blog about a lesson she had done at her school, Students as Teachers- Sixth Grade Tutorial Designers. As always she has produced an incredible outline of her thoughts, implementation and pedagogy behind the lesson.

I decided to start out with an empty PowerPoint and ask students how they defined a “Designer”. After leading them into Kim’s inquiry based activity with three papers, I started taking photos of the students doing the activities and placing them in order into the PowerPoint slides. We also typed  observations students came up with after completing the activity.

As one class period came to an end and the lesson continued the following week, we used the PowerPoint to review what we already had learned about good tutorial design. Students helped me put images taken onto the correct slide and move them in the correct order in which they happened.

It did not occur to us until later, that we were also creating a tutorial- a step by step instruction- on HOW to teach Tutorial Design to elementary school students. Students identified techniques that they had liked from the video examples that we had watched together, such as

• details
• images (are worth a thousand words)
• color coded words
• make sure instructions are in order

We will meet next week again for students to take the next step, get into groups and start designing a tutorial which will focus on explaining “Multiplication” to someone else.