A Teacher’s Thoughts

Assignment: Prepare a brief introduction to our school. What makes our school unique? What makes us special? Then come up with two good questions for Astronaut, Clay Anderson.

We were asked today during a short flash meeting with Diane Hammond if we would participate in a meeting this Monday with Clay Anderson and six other schools. The answer of course was yes. But how to involve everyone in getting ready? Google Docs!

Two students from one of my classes made the perfect choice of writing tool to accomplish the task. Before long they had started a Google document for the introduction and another document for questions. Both documents were shared with every member of the team (Well, everyone but me. Somehow I was left off the list).

It is great to see these kids moving so quickly into embedding these tools into their own learning. As students are given the skills and opportunities to decide what types of tools can help them in their learning they engage more authentically with the learning. Also, this speaks to the skills that will be needed when these students hit the workplace. Simply being able to word process is not enough. The real skill lies in choosing the right tool to use for publishing given the purpose and content of the material to be published. (Here I define publish as taking ideas from cognitive processes of an individual or group and putting them in some way that others may potentially see them. This could extend from jotting a note on a napkin to publishing a full wiki.) What a great way to end a hectic week.