International Education News

I had the pleasure of being invited to “lead” a conversation during a “Teacher’s Buzz” session at the New Media Consortium Campus in Second Life earlier today. I’m looking especially bizarre these days…white socks and black flip flops…how’s that for style? And I got some weird raccoony looking pony tail going on. Oy.

Anyway, it was a pretty interesting dialog (if you can follow it) that went a lot of different directions over the hour. We were trying to get some sense of the educational opportunities here, and to be honest, I’m not sure how much sense I made even to myself. There were about 25 people in the space which made it pretty chaotic at times, but I learned quite a bit from the experience. I’m starting to focus in on what for me, at least, are the salient questions about SL that I’ll save for later, but you can get a sense from the chat transcript if you like.

Vinny Vrotny is a technology integrator at an independent school in Chicago, and he was asked to put together a succinct presentation for grandparents about the work his teachers and students are doing. He came up with the following five ways that teaching and learning have changed at his school due to Read/Write Web tools:

1. Allowing teachers and students to communicate and exchange information with others around the world. (Examples used are an 8th Grade Cultural Exchange that we have begun and a faculty meeting on global collaboration presented by Jennifer Lindsay in Bangladesh)
2. Allowing teachers and students to see the world in new ways. (Example used was the American Holocaust Museum’s GoogleEarth Darfur project, which is being used by our eighth grade Service Learning Project, our ninth grade Regional Geography and History course and our twelfth grade Holocaust elective)
3. Allowing teachers and students to reconstruct history. (Showed our fifth grade’s Mayan village recreation using Google Sketchup)
4. Allowing teachers and students to share new stories. (Played an excerpt of our third grade’s podcasting project to research and tell the stories behind the named spaces around campus)
5. Allowing students to change the world. (Told about our eleventh grade’s service learning project as inspired by reading Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea)

I just like the way that’s all framed. It’s not “we can blog” or “we can use Sketchup.” It’s what we can do with those tools. The presentation itself is included if you need some ideas for that group of grandparents (or others) that might be headed your way.