Providing Sandboxes
Posted by Paul Allison on June 5th, 2006
Join us at the Webcast Academy (and Skype SusanEttenheim) Wednesday, June 7, 2006 at 9:00 pm EST for a discussion of these questions:
In response to last week’s webcast, Richard Stohlman wrote:
I am more and more clearly seeing the need for a separate technology class within a school…. as a sandbox for students to explore… [We need] a place in the day where students can experiment and socialize and maybe process. They need a class where applications become more important than content. Students need time/chance… to play.
This leads me to ask:
- How does your school provide “a sandbox for students to explore?”
- Tell a story.
- Let us see this happening.
- Can this be done within “core classes” or do we, in fact, need a separate class for technology.
- What do you think of Richard’s description of a class where “applications are more important than content?”
- Might this be a good definiton for the subject of English?
- What about keyboarding, isn’t that a focus on applications?
- How do we avoid teaching software when content is de-emphasized?
- Shouldn’t all of our classes be places where students get “time/chance… to play?”
- How do we find time for teachers to focus more on applicatons than on content? When do teachers get to play?
Richard reflects on what a refresing notion it is to see “students work as a resource for other students in other schools.”
- Can you tell any stories about that happening in your school — with or without technology?
- How does it help the learner to be writing and creating rich media for other students who are much like themselves?
- How does it change your writing/creating process when you are presenting to an audience that is at least as smart as you are, maybe smarter?
In last week’s webcast/podcast, Bud Hunt describes a world in which each student has his or her own blog from k-12 and beyond! He/she would blog about math in geometry class and James Baldwin in English class, then we could collect these pieces together through using RSS feeds and aggregrators.
And yet, we also recognized that we wanted group blogs as well, perhaps focused on essential questions from different subject areas.
We decided that we had solved the queston, that we need both individual blogs and classroom, group blogs. We need group blogs that individuals and classes can dip in and out of, yet we also want students to get individual attention for their work.
As Bud invited in last weeks podcast, “Any software engineers out there…” who can help us resolve this individual vs. classroom/topic-based blogs problem? We’d love to hear if anybody thinks they have an intetesting take on this question.
If you listened to last week’s webcast/podcast, you probably had many other questions. Let us know what’s on your mind. Be ready to tell a story about these questions, and Skype in on Wednesday, June 7, 2006 at 9:00 pm EST. Just go to The Webcast Academy or Skype PaulRAllison (Susan Ettenheim will be out of town.). Join us this Wednesday at 9:00 pm.