@Learning_Curve



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I must admit that I have come late to the social media game. I always considered Facebook and Twitter to be for my students, people who subscribe to dating services, and those who have an unquenchable need for attention. About a year ago, however, I was convinced by a couple of my oldest friends to open a Twitter account. I must admit that it has changed the way I get news and information. I dare say that this social media vehicle is my primary source of such. I check my feed many, many, times each day. Twitter allows me to follow only those news outlets, people, or organizations in which I have an interest. Here is my Twitter feed at some random moment today.

These four tweets represent main areas of interest to me; sports, education, punditry, and political/social commentary. I can easily get lost in the Twittersphere at any moment. The primary challenge for me as am educator is developing ways to integrate Twitter in my classroom. I found some great suggestions in the Richardson book. For example the wiki, Twitter Collaboration Stories provides an abundance of valuable suggestions which I could certainly use in my government and Civics classes. Westlake High School in Austin, TX has a Twitter account in which one can find links to student work or live presentations. I follow many educators and professional accounts on my personal account and get some valuable suggestions for lesson plans.
In the spirit of increasing my usage of social media I have established an account for a history-themed trip I run every year. It is my goal to use this tool to send pictures back to all interested parties (parents, family members, students) and as a means of communicating with everyone back here in the "States" while we're in Ireland. We leave on Friday.

Hopefully there will be plenty of shots like this one coming back to Connecticut next week via Twitter. Here I am in front of Lenin's Tomb this past July. I am happy to report that he is still dead.

WIKIed Awesome

source: flickr.com

                                                                          
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of  all human knowledge. That's what we're doing" -Jimmy Wales Wikipedia founder
(Richardson, page 55.)

That's a pretty bold boast, but as one can see from the table above the use of Wikis in the professional word increased more than fivefold during the two years from 2008-2010.  For educators Wikis would seem to provide a vehicle for constant class participation and collaboration among students. The possibilities would seem to be endless. As a cynic by nature I have a few reservations about this new tool. For example, what parameters would be placed upon student participation and contributions to classwide Wikis? How would participation be assessed? How can one ensure that authentic learning is taking place? How good are these projects?

A search of the web yielded some interesting answers to those queries.  A few teachers at Estanica High School in California are piloting something called the Aristotle Experiment. It is based upon the assumption that anything that needed to be taught could probably best be learned by the students themselves, therefore (hopefully) shifting the focus of the class from the teacher to the student. One can find links to participating classes, assessment rubrics, and online discussions on the site.

What about evaluating student learning via Wikis or even introducing a Wikiproject to students. Here is a pretty good guide/rubric to help students get started with digital group projects. With regard to grading group Wikiprojects, the site flatclassroomproject offers host of suggested rubrics that can be tailored to the specific content and grade level of the classroom. Both of these tools are pretty sound and there are a plethora of resources on the web.

Finally, as I wondered about the quality of the projects completed by groups of students I found numerous examples of sophisticated and intricate work done by student sin many disciplines. For example, this biology project was extremely thorough.  Here's a really good history fair project which pretty much makes story boards look obsolete. In the true spirit of a flat classroom here's a history project that was done jointly by eighth graders from schools in Michigan and Colorado during the 2007-2008 school year. This is incredible.

Supplementing Texts With Blogs

One of the great issues facing teachers today seems to be to what degree they will incorporate technology into their classrooms. The most fundamental form this takes is whether or not the school will use traditional "bound" books or ebooks on readers such as Kindle or iPads. The big challenge for me is finding a presentation of history or civics that is objective. All authors have bias in their presentations and this usually plays out in the events, people, and narratives advanced in texts. David McCulloch, perhaps our country's best known living historian wrote eloquently about this dilemma in the Wall Street Journal about a year ago. He bemoaned the decline in historical literacy among students in our country and proposed some fundamental changes to the curriculum to rememdy these shortcomings. Reading Richardson's Chapters 3 and 4, and particularly the parts about blogging with students, sparked some ideas about incorporating this important tool into my classroom as a means of complementing, and at times filling in large gaps, in the text presentation.

One way this could be done, and which I tried with my AP Government class, is having them watch excerpts from a debate between Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer on YouTube on the topic of judicial activism versus originalism. You can watch the arguments made by each simply by clicking on his name. Unfortunately, any AP Government textbook I have ever considered using in my class gives little or no treatment to the originalist school of Constitutional interpretation as the authors tend to be on the left of the political spectrum and do not take this school of thought seriously. Although I don't have a blog yet dedicated to my class, I put these links up on Edline, which is the vehicle our school uses to communicate with students and parents. Anticipating a long weekend as a result of the blizzard, I assigned them to watch the excerpts and write a short paper on their understandings of the two judicial philosophies. I can't wait to see what I get on Monday.

Another useful resource for social studies teachers I discovered in this class is American Memory Online which provides both teachers and students with access to over 7,000 primary source documents, The Library of Congress site which has many lesson plans and primary sources, and Thomas which is the official site of Congress and can be used to trck the progress of any piece of legislation. The possibilities are indeed very exciting!

                    

Richardson Chaps. 1 & 2

Being a social studies teacher for the past 16 years I have developed an acute sense of history and turning points. As I read through the first two chapters of Richardson I could not help but feel as though mankind is in a period of time similar to that of the Renaissance when the invention of the printing press fundamentally changed everything. Religion was shaken as now the Bible was accesible to all and not simply the purview of the few educated clergy. Society and culture became much more democratic as well as ideas and commentary now spread much more freely and rapidly. The rise of the internet and technology and their consequent effects on learning and the dissemination of information will result in metmorphoses we can yet imagine.