Let students create!
In my first post, I posed the essential question:
Why would any teacher (especially a successful, experienced teacher) investigate using social media tools like Nings, blogs, or wikis as a part of their craft?
Besides being a regenerative experience for your as a teacher, social media allows your students to be generative. That is, students can create.
One of my favorite wiki sites is educational origami. You can find some wonderful resources that link new social media tools and tasks to Bloom’s Taxonomy. In Bloom’s Taxonomy, creating is the highest “level” of learning:
“Creativity involves all of the other facets of the taxonomy. In the creative process the student/s, remembers, understands & applies knowledge, analyses and evaluates outcomes, results, successes and failures as well as processes to produce a final product.”
*Taken from the educational origami page on Bloom’s – Creating.
Better yet, what more fulfilling aspect of being human than the ability to create. Often, this is a missing component from “classroom education.” For example, I while I teach Advanced Placement Environmental Science (APES), the course syllabus puts a premium on students understanding and remembering tremendous amounts of content. Of course, I try to push kids to analyze and apply and evaluate (see below), but they just don’t get much chance to create in the AP world.
Click to Enlarge-taken from: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy
So, how have I pushed kids towards the HOTS end of the spectrum on the Digital Taxonomy using social media?
- Last year I had my seniors create an “APES wikipedia” for their first semester exam review (I’ll cover the details in another post). I divided up the major topics from the semester, and student’s created a wiki page for each. They had to select the text, pictures, diagrams, video that would best illustrate the concepts for their classmates. Of course, it was an attempt to boost remembering. We, as teachers, often look down on remembering as the lowest of thinking skills, but we all want our kids to remember some content!
- This year my seniors are creating a class blog using the scribe post method. I learned this method from Darren Kuropatwa, a teacher in Canada that I’ve never met face-to-face. My students take turns “re-teaching” the day’s lesson or activity on a class web log. They have the freedom to choose how to do this task. Here is one of my favorite examples of a scribe post about a field trip we took to a local ecological preserve. What a great resource for students who could not come that day! Here is another scribe post from a lesson on evolution where the student communicated correct content, but added the diagrams (and some humor) he thought were helpful to understanding the information. Best of all, this method helps build a sense of community within and beyond our classroom walls (a subject for a later post).
These are first attempts for me. Yes, there are standards and means for evaluation. And, the majority of kids have positive things to say about these methods, but I’ll share those next time.
