A Successful Day? Partly.

Today was a big tech day in my classroom. We started off the morning by talking about what RSS is, and the benefits of having an account. I showed them my Bloglines account and had one of the students show her iGoogle homepage that I had her make up in advance.

Away we went.

Students had to construct a blogs tab that was 50% local students and 50% students from the school in Los Angeles that we are working with.  We also had to talk as a class about the pre - made widgets that iGoogle offers and what kinds of things were appropriate for school, useful, helpful, etc. They played with layouts, with tabs, with the themes and everything else they could find. Of course, most of their pages are only half finished and need an "under construction" sign hung on them. But then again, with the ease of revision and the number of changes they will possibly make over the year, these pages will never be completed. This is going to be interesting to watch. With 54 students in their "class" and a lot of pre - made widgets to choose from, how they choose to construct their pages will bear watching.

In the afternoon we had our first live chat session between our two schools using private Moodle chatrooms that we had set up in advance; eleven of them. Questions were posted in advance that students were to discuss. They also had to choose a person who was to capture the important concepts during their chat and choose another student who will be speaking to the entire group next Wednesday about their findings during a video Skype call.

So, using Skype as a backchannel between Snow Lake and Los Angeles, approximately 50 junior high students swamped a server with login requests and we spent twenty minutes getting Moodle stable enough to let everyone comfortably into their rooms. Reviewing the logs of the chats later, the next twenty minutes on average were spent by the groups trying to decide upon the role everyone would play. And that is how easy it is to get in trouble. I had called the person who was to take notes for their group a "scribe." The kids in LA called them a "reporter." I called the student who was to speak to the entire group of students next Wednesday a "reporter," while they were calling this person a "presenter." So between crashing chat rooms, sorting out confusion over groups, roles, and language an originally scheduled 45 minute chat turned into a successful 15 - 20 minutes for each group.

We learned a few things about the strength of our Internet service, the power of their server in LA, and the abilities of our students to juggle problems and questions.

At the end of the day we have half constructed RSS pages and chat sessions in which half of the time was productive and the other half was spent tackling all types of problems. This is what it is like working with technology in classrooms. Was it frustrating? Certainly. But most importantly we saw potential in several places. The potential of handling information in custom built ways that are efficient and meaningful for the user and give them a new tool. We also saw the potential of chat rooms for hooking up kids who are beginning to know each other as well as if they were in the same classroom instead of the 3 700 kms that Google Earth tells me it is from Snow Lake to Van Nuys.

technorati tags:st, elisabeth, school, skype, igoogle, moodle

Comments

[Dean Shareski]

But according to Google Earth, it's only about 2,700km as the crow flies. And course from your room, it's a lot closer than that.

[Marie Coleman]

I love it! I also intend to share this post with a number of teachers who want to use the tools and make the connections, but keep having the barriers and "boundaries" turn them away! Your experiences demonstrate the reality of implementing such a 21st century lesson - the good, the bad, and the ugly - with an ultimately positive ending. Thanks for sharing!

BTW Sorry you missed Jen's interview Google preso - a unique experience!

[Rick Biche]

If the students had to spend time dealing with confusion resulting from slightly different vocabulary I would think that was time well spent. Agreeing on anything revolves on calling out assumptions to be agreed upon as well. This type of challenge sounds like a fairly commonplace occurrence. Imagine the extension if your classes were actually speaking different languages.