Technology & Learning - February 2008 - (Page 16) is one way to address this new equity issue. Clarence Fisher, a middle school teacher at Joseph H. Kerr School in rural Snow Lake, Manitoba, Canada, has teamed with Barbara Barreda, an administrator at the independent St. Elisabeth School, in the suburbs of Los Angeles, to create the ThinWalls Classroom project, which is based on connectedness, networking, and learning beyond the classroom walls. Through his blog “Remote Access,” Fisher launched the call for “a classroom interested in beginning a yearlong collaboration toward becoming truly globalized.” His criteria for partnership included access at school to wikis, blogs, ThinkFree, YackPack, and Moodle, as well as to VOIP tools such as Skype to exchange videos, photos, and more. The next steps for the ThinWalls Classroom project will include validating the communication channels for safety and privacy, but Fisher and Barreda are predicting an explosion of communication between the two classes. According to Fisher, “It will not be on ‘official’ channels and much of it will be ‘under our radar’ and on their own time. But this will change the relationships and deepen them between our classes. And more important, it changes our role as teachers and leaders of student learning.” Fisher and Barreda are being open- minded in terms of the expected outcomes from this project, “Most of the goals of the ThinWalls Classroom do not revolve around learning specific content. Instead, they circle around ideas of international collaboration and communication. While this collaboration is certainly grounded in the content we are required by our they learn in school will have any bearing on their success in life. However, evidence also shows that by engaging students through participatory media, we can turn these statistics around. Inspired by the recent K12Online Conference, Marsha Ratzel, a 6thgrade math and science teacher at Studies show that students using new media are more engaged in the classroom. © SERGEY BEREZIN/DREAMSTIME.COM; BACKGROUND © BRAM JANSSENS/DREAMSTIME.COM FOREGROUND PHOTO jurisdictions to work with, we are using these ideas as basics only, wanting to move far beyond them. We want our students to learn to manage their own networks, and begin to understand the power of connectivity.” A New Kind of Student Studies show that by their senior year, barely one-fourth of today’s students agree that school is meaningful or their courses are interesting—and less than half believe what suburban Leawood Middle School in Kansas’s Blue Valley School District, began to consider how she might give the new student-centered strategies a try. In one project, she helped her students brainstorm all sorts of questions around weathering and erosion, and then allowed them to research the answers independently, using new tools. Ratzel recalls, “We used Flickr to find evidence of erosion, Google Maps to plot out tours of places you’d find mass movement, erosion, glacial action, or water erosion, and Photo Story to publish an online magazine about their questions and findings.” After days of discussion, sharing, and peer feedback, Ratzel began to notice a new voice emerging from her students: instead of just being on task, they were enthralled. Ratzel describes it in this way: 16 | www.techlearning.com http://www.techlearning.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.