International Teen Life Reflection

As we finish up the video production part of the International Teen Life project, I asked the kids in my class to do some reflective thinking on their blogs. I gave them four guiding questions:

- What did you learn about your topic?

- What did you learn about collaborating internationally and locally? (I asked them to think about tools and skills)

- What do you feel would have made this project easier / better / more interesting?

finally, I asked them:

- What have you learned about telling a story combining pictures / words / sounds / video?

A few quotes that came from their posts:

"I also learned that you don’t have to be in the same place as a person to know them because there are so many new and different ideas in the world that bring us together. I learned that we can learn about new people using the tools I listed before. The internet is making everyone in the world close.

Anna"

"Its really neat to meet people that are so different then you are because then you could and probably will be amazed about some of the events that they had to go through there. And the amazing part is that we got to experience this all in middle school! Most people wouldn’t get this chance in their whole lifetime.

Kate"

"When you publish it on line I learned that it isn’t really yours anymore. You can’t tell people what it is supposed to mean. The readers can think of it as whatever.

Matthew"

"When Mr. Fisher first told us about this project I thought that it would be very difficult to communicate with the kids on the other side of the world, but I found out that it wasn’t that hard. The internet allows us to do so much more then we ever could be before. There are so many programs out there that allow us to communicate and talk to each other.

Toni"

Two big ideas have emerged out of their overall impressions of this project:

1.) Their main concern was about communication. Although we promoted the use of the wiki and the kids' blogs for communicating, they wished they had been given more opportunities to interact directly using tools such as Skype. They are concerned that they produced a piece in the end that the kids from the other places never had enough input into.

2.) The students were astounded at the time it took to weave all of the pieces together to complete this project. It was an amazingly complex task involving bits and pieces from students on three continents. Skype, MSN, blogs, wikis, video, still photos, mp3 files, copyright vs. Creative Commons, Google docs, and more all served a purpose for this project. I was very impressed with their ability to handle and make appropriate use of all of these tools. A complex task, but one that is vital for students learning to work in a global context.

technorati tags:ITL, reflection, classroom

Comments

[Andrew Pass]

Sounds like a great project. I wonder if your students have given much thought to how they might use these tools later on in life? Also, it doesn't appear as if you used any MUVEs. I wonder if you considered using any?

On Thursday night I was at the ISTE social on Second Life. As I was getting off, I said "Good night." One of the other participants responded, "Good night, - I'm getting ready to eat lunch." I thought it was very cool.