Here’s a quick post on an imperfect start to using video games in the classroom for teaching the soft-skills necessary for collaboration in a manner (hopefully) authentic and relevant to students’ media experience.
Teams of 3-4 students played New Super Mario Bros. Wii at a classroom station.
Teams were asked to win the most levels possible with [...]
Students engaged in creating media that they value mostly do so either outside of school or underground at school. Many teams of teachers and students create work together that both value, but too often the “fun stuff” is either cut out of the school day or limited to what @budtheteacher calls “semi-school environments” in [...]
I’m sure many of you are familiar with the TwitterKids of Tanzania – students tweeting in English with followers from around the world. I’m also sure many of you are much more adept than I am at breaking down the walls of the classroom with tools like Twitter, Skype, Google for Educators, wikis, [...]
Kyle Pace posted a challenge during last night’s #edchat on encouraging teachers to adapt and change in response to the needs of today’s students.
It sent me thinking in a new direction about teacher evaluation as practiced by us teachers.
Apart from formal teacher evaluation, we evaluate one another all the time. We evaluate ourselves against [...]
[Editor's note: this one goes out to Shelly Blake-Plock of TeachPaperless and is a kind of meta-testament to the power of a widely distributed PLN to effect classroom reform for authentic engagement.]
The classroom is up and running, and we’ve been through three weeks of shake-out. In the interests of sharing and transparent teaching, I [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about authentic audiences for my students’ work. Most often, a teacher is the immediate audience, though not always an authentic one. Parents, too, are an traditional audience for student work, but their authenticity waxes and wanes with their children’s relationships with them. Because of communications technology [...]
[Editor's note: Guest blogger Damani Harrison, gifted musician and mentor, joins Classroots.org for a series of posts sharing his take on authentic engagement in teaching and learning. Damani works for the Music Resource Center, "a state-of-the-art facility where teens can learn the latest technology in the music industry and study and participate in every phase [...]
I found Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth’s Social Media Campaign image a few days ago via Steven Anderson’s (@web20classroom) Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom. It broadened my thinking about the curriculum map due to my head of school in September. I work at a middle school that strives to differentiate instruction by content, process, [...]
Trevor Przyuski works as an instructional coach for Albemarle County Public Schools. In, “Let Them Own It,” he writes about the tension between children’s authentic engagement with personally meaningful work and their struggles with traditional school work. By sharing an anecdote from his own experience as a classroom teacher, Trevor offers a model of instructional [...]
I’m very grateful to be able to share with you the work going on at Murray High School in Charlottesville, Virginia. Murray High School is “the world’s first Glasser Quality Public High School.” The school uses William Glasser’s Choice Theory and Quality Schools framework to re-engage students with the joy of learning. [...]
Chad teaches humanities at a charter school and blogs on reforming classroom practice and democratic education.
