WWW-a World Wide Wonder-teaching and learning.

I have been exploring more about 21st Century skills as I set up a new project for our students that has been funded by the Innovation Next Practice Division with DEECD. My project will involve students exploring their roles and responsibilities as global citizens. Through the use of a ning and a wiki I hope to help students to understand how we all have a responsibility to be aware and respond to global issues. I also want them to understand the role the internet plays in this scenario and that we can’t use distance and time as excuses for not being involved.
My research led me to a brilliant site called The Partnership For 21st Century Skills that advocates embedding 21st Century skills into education. This is the type of site you revisit again and again and I will be using it as a catalyst for many a conversation with my students. I also found a really powerful video on this site that discusses the One Child Per Laptop (OLPC) project which aims to revolutionise the access for the poorest kids in the world by providing them with a robust, cheap, low powered laptop to use in their education. Although mighty impressive and an amazing project, what really struck me was this associated video of Professor Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child that gives a very short explanation about the vision of OCPC. What struck me was that Professor Negroponte talks not about the laptops themselves but about what sort of thinking and creating he envisions that the children would do as a result of having access to this technology. It reminded me of why we need to be constantly asking ourselves why we have our students work with technology and what we want them to think, do, know and understand as a result.
I plan to show this video to the teachers here at Wedderburn in the hope that it generates some discussion about what, why and how we use information technology in our classrooms.

Sometimes I delay writing in this blog because I want to spend time thinking and reflecting before I write. But the upshot of that I that I don’t write as often as I should. So in the interests of getting something posted that might be of use to someone else, here is a little activity that I did with Grade 3/4 students using Wordle. They loved it and the teachers thought it was pretty cool too.
This is how we did it.

To start off our activity we are going to brainstorm all the words we can think of that remind us of the Olympics. I am going to write them into a word document and show in on the Interactive whiteboard as the students are brainstorming. Once we have lots of words we are going to save the document into a shared folder on the server so that everyone in the class can open it up and save it as their own.

Once everyone has the document in front of them they are each going to copy and duplicate words that are related to the country they are studying and add them to their Olympics brainstorm list

Then we are going to do something really cool with it. Everyone is going to use Wordle to create their own word clouds that shows the way they have changed words to reflect their country. The more times they duplicate their countries words, the more their words will increase in size.

Then we are going to use Ifranview to grab a screen print of it, resize it and then upload it to this blog.

We hope you enjoy the wordles.

To see more check out our burnersblog and our Grade 3/4 wiki.