Connected World Week 2

During the short week due to parent-teacher-student conferences, students had three days to spend on the Connected World Project (and of course all of the other wonderful things we do in humanities class.)

I'm enjoying reading the students blogs and learning so much about them! I was impressed with the level of reflection many of the students generated, particularly about how the whole project is working. It is so valuable to get feedback such as, "In our group we were sure how this directly connected to last week when we met with different students." I also had to laugh a little to myself about the student comment that basically directly contradicted a conversation I'd had with a fellow 7th grade humanities teacher. As teacher, we were questioning why we met in "issue" groups first rather an having them figure out all about their regions. We teachers went on and on about how the kids needs to have the place they're studying solidified in their minds, etc. However, more than one student commented on how much more they liked discussing the issue assigned rather than finding out about the region.

I wonder what's going through a student's mind as he's sitting here in Thailand and is asked to think about Bhutan or Colombia or Moscow. Though those are actual real places they could go and touch and see and in general have sensory experiences, it seems like for some reason the issues such as health care and global warming and "financial crisis" are much more real than those real places. Upon reflection it seems obvious that "human rights" would generate more interest and discussion than "find the total population of the Middle East."

I've also liked the students' blogging about technology. Though some of Week Two blogs weren't as thorough as week one, many were much more indepth and detailed about the project and how things are going with technology. We had some major slow-downs last week, and many of the kids commented on that, though we're all so used to interrupted connections being a part of our lives that nobody expressed much more than mild dismay and several simply said they typed their blog on good old-fashioned MS Word and then copied and pasted into their blog when it was back up and running.

The my.isb social networking program is working reasonable well, and given that it's new and this year's crop of 7th graders are probably using it the most, both content and feature wise, I'd say it's pretty amazing. I like the scaled down version of the blogging program, which we're currently using the most. My.isb has a "friends" feature as well. I'm not 100% sure what all happens if you're "friends" with somebody, as in what friends can access and what non-friends cannot. It seems like everybody logged in can read any one elses blog. I find the "friend" feature useful as a teacher. Once I've become "friends" with my students, I can organize them into groups, which is wonderful for the simple purpose of grading. So if I click on my "Humanities 7/8" collection of friends, all of those students' icons pop up and I can easily manage their blogs and keep track of which one I've read and which one I haven't. Another slick feature with some potential deals with blogging. On my.isb blogs, the blogger has to set the visibility of his post. The default is "private" which bascially means unpublished. The other options are "logged in users" which is anyone logged into my.isb, friend or not; next is "the whole world" (I think that's actually what it says) which is, well, anybody on the internet who happens to stumble across the blog (I think we're excluded from google searches, though not sure about that....) Things get fun though with the blog settings once you create "collections of friends." I can write a blog that I want only those in a certain "friends collection" to see... There could definitely be a few more "advanced" features with it all, but very, very functional as is.