Wall of Intolerance- What if….

During my visit this past January to the Graded School, in São Paulo, Brazil, I met Jamie Tuttle  Middle School Guidance Counselor. He told me about an incident at their International School and the response as a community:

We found our world map defaced with several derogatory and racist remarks. The following words and statements were written on the map:

It shocked our international school and we knew that something needed to be done. An 8th grade student brought up the idea of working together as a school to create a new world map. As the conversations about this idea grew, we felt that we needed to confront the issue of bullying and how racist and derogatory words can be very damaging to an individual and a community. We decided to confront these issues by creating a Wall of Intolerance.

Jamie also shared with me their idea of documenting and sharing the occurrence and the process of “doing something about it” in order to not let a problem being hushed up.  The Graded community produced a documentary and I am thrilled to be able to share it with Langwitches’ readers.

In addition, Jeff Lippman, the Middle School principal of the Graded School also created a flipped lesson on Ted Ed for the Wall of Intolerance documentary.

This documentary shows the process that our Middle School went through when we discovered that our world map had been defaced with racist, xenophobic and classist graffiti. In a truly collaborative effort between students, teachers and administration, we confronted issues of discrimination and bullying and moved forward together as a community by tearing down hatred and building a new world map

I am wondering how other schools could benefit beyond just taking the idea of the “Wall of Intolerance” as a resource or model for their own schools?  I am thinking… what if….

• What if… we create a collaborative Wall of Intolerance?
• What if … we connect students across geography and tear down their Wall of Intolerance  (via Skype or Google Hangout)?
• What if … we crowdsourced testimonials/how to guides on how to grow from being a (passive) bystander to a(n) (active) ally.
• What if… we create a meme, a chain that is being passed on to other schools to add their perspectives, stories, solutions, actions, thoughts.

Learning in the Modern Classroom

I can die happy now I have seen learning in the 21st Century modern classroom!

The learning just oozes through the cracks of the physical classroom walls.

Learning is amplified by the amount of people who are collaborating, participating, communicating and creating. The learning is NOT about the technology tools, but what students can DO with them to learn in new ways. The learning is about an authentic tasks, that allows students to contribute in a individualized and personalized manner to make them realize that their work matters in the real world.

It all started out with a conversation between Mike Fisher and me. He had written over 40 children poems and was in the process of wondering what to do with them? I was looking for an authentic task for 9-11 year old students. We felt we had a perfect match! How about getting the students Language Arts  and Art teacher involved? The initial idea was to make a unit of poetry come alive, study Mike’s poems and visualize the poems by creating illustrations.

Great plan… it snowballed from there…

A quick Skype call between Mike and the teachers, helped flesh out each of our expectations and a timeline for the “project”. A critical component was the participants’ willingness to be flexible and see where the students would take “the project”.

What if…

• …Mike allowed students to alter his original poems if they felt inspired to remix them, making the creation process fluid and embedding new ways of looking at forms of copyright?
• … Mike offered to write a new poem to additionally created illustrations by students, flipping the collaboration roles?
• …we published a poetry book on various platforms? (hard cover/eBook)
• …we had student run a marketing and advertisement campaign?
• …we involved the Math teacher to support students in calculating how much the book should cost, what would the profit be, how would a profit be split?
• …allowed the class to handle the entire business venture?
• …we incorporated Alan November’s concept of the Digital Learning Farm and leaving a legacy?

Each student was “given” a poem from Mike to be responsible for. We set up a first Skype call with Mike, the author, for students to meet him, ask questions about “their” poem.

Part of our job as teachers was to observe students as they were taking on the roles outlined in the Digital Learning Farm. We were/are looking to identify NEW FORMS of assessment, since our “project” was not to be an add-on to traditional assessment tools.

As I was watching students talk to Mike Fisher via Skype, Will Richardson’s call for Thinking Differently About Learning, which includes Learning to Talk to Strangers came to mind. As students interacted, I was watching their body language, paying attention to their vocabulary, ability to articulate an idea, their conversation etiquette and ability to follow a conversation and interaction. Stay tuned for the publication of a Taxonomy of Skype Conversation to facilitate assessment of video conferencing.

As the Skype conversation was happening in the foreground, other students were busy documenting and collaborating in backchannels. A Google Doc was opened and shared among all students, teachers and Mike Fisher. The multi-tasker Mike is, allowed students to Google Chat at the same time as he was talking to students via Skype.

Other students had taken on the task to tweet the Skype call

Take a look at the 4th and 5th grade Twitter feed, documenting the skype call. Students are exhibiting understanding of Twitter grammar, syntax and etiquette. They are showing progression by starting to add value, links, citations and they own thoughts. They are summarizing and articulating thoughts in 140 characters or less. They are directly communicating, disseminating, collaborating and connecting via social networking.  We are using Twitter and HOTS as a way to assess these skills.

We had other students use different tools to take notes too. The notes app on their iPad or traditional paper and pen

One student chose to summarize what he heard during the Skype call by mindmap doodling. He was able to re-tell the different poems that were discussed between his classmates and the author.

Take a few minutes to peek into the classroom as students were debriefing from the Skype experience.

Poetry Book Skype from langwitches on Vimeo.

So, where do we go from here? The students are very excited and are taking ownership. There is no talk about what kind of grade they will be receiving for their work. An authentic audience will decide if they were successful. Students will volunteer to take on different roles in the publishing, marketing, finance, communication department. We will allow them to take the lead, consulting, coaching and modeling if needed.

Stay tuned as this “school project” unfolds.

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Quality Tutorial Designer’s Checklist

Helping students become quality Tutorial Designers has been on my mind and agenda lately. The reasons are plentiful, from the train of thought “if you can teach it, you know it”, being a vital skill in the 21st century, Alan November’s work “Who owns the Learning?”/ “Digital Learning Farm” to tutorials being an important piece in the self-motivated and self-directed learning of our times.

Teaching, nor creating (digital) tutorials, may come natural to everyone. There are are several skills involved. which are valuable for our students to learn.

• communication
  not only understanding content and process, but being able to express and communicate them to someone else. The communication can be accomplished in a variety of media.
• collaboration
  curating all student created tutorials in one place (ex. wiki) will create a hub, where students can search for tutorials of content, that they need a refresher on and  it creates a depository for students in future years to come.
• writing
  writing a script is an essential part of tutorial design. Tutorial writing could be considered part of the expository writing and technical writing genre
• vocabulary
  using  specific vocabulary related to the content explained
• storyboarding
  “Storyboards are graphic organizers in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing”~ Wikipedia
• digital storytelling
  a tutorial is a special type of story. It requires the “teller” of the story to engage the “listener” via different digital media
• networking
  tutorials are meant for others to learn from us
• digital media
  creating, editing, and mixing of a variety of media forms (text, images, audio, video, etc.) and the fluency to work with a variety of media and switch effortless between them
• empathy
  the ability to understand and share the feelings (ex. not know how to do something or understand) of another

In addition to supporting students in gaining competency and fluency in the above mentioned skills, we also need to emphasize QUALITY work. Too many student-created tutorials, lack depth of content knowledge and more emphasis seemed to have been placed on using a specific tool rather than showing evidence of learning.

In an effort to support teachers and have a handy list for students when creating tutorials, I created the following checklist. The checklist is divided into three parts:

1. Steps
2. Technique
3. Quality Considerations

Each part is divided further into different sections

Steps:

• storyboarding
• creation
• dissemniation

Technique:

• screencasting
• audio
• movie
• images
• text
• comics
• miscellaneous

Quality Considerations:

• audio
• video
• images
• text
• content
• strategy & procedures

Download the Tutorial Design Checklist as a pdf file.

Interested in reading more about my thoughts on Tutorial Designers?

• A Vital Skill? Look For, Find and Learn from Online Guides & Tutorials
• Tutorial Designers, Guides, Step-by-Step Instructions: Amplification & Imagination
• Is It Worth It? Student Created Tutorials
• Becoming good Tutorial Designers
• Tutorial Designers- Empowered Learners- Contributors
• Teaching is the Highest Form of Understanding