Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, across the global community, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others. Students:
D. Contribute to project teams. Produce original works or solve problems in a team setting.
I am now looking at the standards through a different lens. As I read them for this response I am specifically thinking about the new tools I have been investigating and wondering how I might use one of them to help my students experience the skills outlined in the standard.
Looking at this standard of working with a variety of media with a focus on communication while working as part of a team gave me this idea: I am thinking about having small groups of students create a newspaper or a blog page. Goodness, as I am thinking about this my idea is changing. Over the years I have had many ways of communicating with parents, I am now thinking I would like to try a Room 210 Blog. It would be a place where I could post those things I need to share, but be published each week by a different group of students. The group could add their own post- a story about something, add some photos and/or change the icons.
At this point I am not sure which direction I want to go, but the great thing is that by creating either a blog or a newspaper, I still work on the standard. I am giving the students an opportunity to work collaboratively within a team, making decisions to produce a product they can share with others in both our classroom and the wider community- parents, extended family, school and possibly the internet. (I think I am going to need to learn the policy of PPS/my school on blogs and putting up photos and/or student names.)
It's fun to get a glimpse of your thinking process, thank you for sharing! I hope you have fun with encouraging your students to be publishers!!! And thank you for mentioning school policy--yes, that's very important to find out your school policy. Often there is a release form that parents sign (or not) at the beginning of the year that lets their child's name/photo be included in the school website (or not). And this is pretty important, especially in a world where custody disputes and foster care are all too much a sad reality.
ReplyDelete