I thought Warlick's statistics about what students do online -- suggesting that their activity is much more likely to be school related than most people imagine -- is telling information. While many parents are very open to Classroom 2.0 innovations, many are also leery about the possibilities. It is going to be a challenge for us (and our colleagues) to start alleviating some of these fears by teaching our communities about the benefits that await our young people (and the possible detriment to their future success if we don't embrace some of these new learning tools).
Along those same lines, I do have a question. Because I have taught only at the high school level, this has not been much of an issue. However, I know that in recent years, there have been concerns about the practice of students switching papers and correcting one another's work. For some lower-performing students, this has been an embarrassing experience and some teachers have stopped doing it altogether. So, how does this transfer into the digital world? What if some students (and/or their) parents do not want their work published -- even in a "private"/"protected" wiki or blog? (Anyone who has done peer reviewing in a class has surely run into a multitude of issues here, of course.) Certainly, I can imagine alternative assignments, but how might one go about addressing this, en masse?
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I know what you are saying, but I want to share what I have observed. We had all of the juniors in a high school required "English 3" class and we started encouraging them to read (Subjects Matter by Harvey Daniels). We brought in laptops and gave them time each week to post their reponses to what they were reading. It was amazing. They started posting to each other in other sections. The kids in first hour might respond to kids in seventh hour and they were very focused. They were reading and writing!
ReplyDeleteI interviewed a few of them. One guy told me he hadn't finished maybe a couple of books in high school. He had read ten in a semester and asked to be interviewed to share that.
I asked a girl what made this work so well for them. She said something like this - "John doesn't really talk in class, but he writes some great posts and I always read him first and then read the book he recommends".
So, I have not had anyone ask to not "be published". This is about 100 kids a year and we've done it for four years.
Of course, they might ask and an alternate would be appropriate.
Read and write a review. The challenge would be who would respond to the print version. It might be the teacher or another student, but changes are it would be the instructor response. Very much like we used to do as a matter of course.
thanks for your thoughtful posts!