Colorado Conversation: Roundtable With Barbara and Clarence

Colorado Conversation: Roundtable With Barbara and Clarence February 23, 2008

Posted by Matthew Woolums in Conference Sessions, Edubloggers.
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This conversation is run through http://www.mebeam.com/alpharoom.php?room=colearning

Barbara Barreda - K-8 principal from Los Angeles, CA.

Clarence Fisher - 7th and 8th grade teacher from Snowlake, Manitoba

B- our students have a limited view of the world. Working with C’s students has expanded their horizons.

C- B and I met over the Internet, through blogs, through Skype

C- we wanted ‘Thin Walls’ to go beyond an online project. A lot of it was experimental. We started off with VoiceThreads. We went from there to blogs. We did a novel study together. We’re learning to be facilitators, to get out of the way, to develop the tools as they are needed.

B- my students live below the porverty level, but in a private school, our parents make a lot of sacrifices. We work to get computers donated, we use open source solutions.

C- we’ve found that the open source and web based solutions lend themselves to collaboration better than the commercial tools.

C- we’ve worked on common rubrics, some common grading standards. It is difficult to assess (through existing standards) manners and collaboration. We’ve had to develop many of the tools ourselves.

B- some of our teachers have shifted to assessing skills.

B- we’re going to be working on that global understanding through the rest of the year.

Are you seeing a change in the writing skills of students who are collaborating online? C- they become writers of their own account. They learn the authentic voices of that are their own. They learn about voice and audience. We live in a world where experts are going away and everyone has an equal voice. B- we have a better idea of students’ thinking than we would in regular classroom interactions because we have the whole conversation. C- the ability to access and review the transcript provides a window we don’t have otherwise.

C- students are IM-ing each other, but we haven’t see much social networking. B- I have a MySpace account and haven’t seen much interaction on the part of the students.

B- we’re trying to show that these are learning spaces, not just games. C- active mornitoring on the part of the teacher helps students learn to be good digital citizens.

C- the Asus eeepc’s we got were flying off the shelves for sustained silent reading. To me reading is reading.

B- give them (teachers) permission to make mistakes and time to try new things. (I think this applies to students too!)

http://colearning.wikispaces.com/Thin+Walls

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