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Shona Whyte:
Leslie M-B is assistant professor of history in Idaho and has this thought-provoking post on using collaborative digital projects to improve the teaching and learning of history:
"To move beyond the era of content standards, we need to acknowledge—and convey to our teacher candidates—that one need not be an expert in a content area in order to teach it. We already see this attitude in English classes, where the literary canon has been in flux for some time. As an English teacher, I wouldn’t need to be an acknowledged expert on, or even a specialist in, Huckleberry Finn to teach it to junior high school students. Instead, I’d need to know how a novel works; I’d need to know how plot, characters, conflict, and other literary devices combine. Knowing the history is necessary, too, but information about what was going on in the U.S. at the time Twain wrote his novel is only an internet search away. I need not have learned it at some fixed point way back in tenth grade and filed it away until I required it in my own classroom teaching."
Much of this is of course directly applicable to the language classroom.
Via Robin Good, Shona Whyte
How to turn students into curators.
We often ask our students to create annotated bibliographies, and this focuses on their capacity to evaluate and make decisions about the validity, reliability and relevance of sources they have found. using Scoop.it, we can ask them to do much the same thing, but they will publish their ideas for an audience, and will also be able to provide and use peer feedback to enhance and tighten up their thinking. This is relevant to any curriculum area. Of course it is dependent on schools being able to access any social media, but rather than thinking about what is impossible, perhaps we could start thinking about what is possible and lobbying for change.
We often ask our students to create annotated bibliographies, and this focuses on their capacity to evaluate and make decisions about the validity, reliability and relevance of sources they have found. Using Scoop.it, we can ask them to do much the same thing. But they will publish their ideas for an audience, and will also be able to provide and use peer feedback to enhance and tighten up their thinking. This is relevant to any age, and any curriculum area. Of course it is dependent on schools being able to access social media. But rather than thinking about what is impossible, perhaps we should start thinking about what is possible, and lobbying for change. Could you use a Scoop.it collection as an assessment task?