Lesson Plans for the Read/Write Web

The Social Studies Department at my school has started using a Weblog to archive lessons for the various classes in the department. I’m thinking now that it probably should have been a wiki, but they wanted the ability to comment back to the author of the lesson and it seemed that a blog would be more functional in that respect. They also wanted the ability to tag their entries and to search by those keywords, a feature that the Manila metadata plugin allows for. So now, if a teacher is looking for a plan about Native Americans, for example, she can just search for it within the site. Not as elegant as what Alan has done, I know, but it works. (My programming skills are, shall we say, less than exceptional.)

What I was thinking about as I read one of the plans is all of the ways it could be helped by these new tools of ours. Now I know that this particular one is more of a history lesson, but what about adding these ideas to the study of Native Americans:

Create a blog written in the voices of those early Indians complete with artistic interpretations of what they were experiencing. Have students use the comments to begin conversations about the events between the settlers, the government and the Indians. Better yet, invite living American Indians into those conversations.

Have students go through Flickr and select pictures that they feel represents what Native American life is like today. Have them do some pieces of “flicktion” about what they see. This group tagged Navajo might be a starting point. (Some of these are really beautiful, by the way.)

Create a wiki where research information about that time period can be stored in annotated fashion by students.

Have students monitor news feeds from Google and Yahoo News, and the topic feeds from Furl and del.icio.us.

Create and publish oral histories by doing interviews with Native Americans via Skype or by having students role play characters or situations.

Ask students to create screencasts that show and annotate the best resource sites on the Web dealing with Native American issues.

Create a meta-blog site for this topic where students post news items about what they have created and found or links to student best practices. This might be where the teacher coordinates and organizes the content.

I’m sure there is more here, but the idea is that students can work collaboratively to create and publish content about any topic, and that we can aggregate that content in ways that create a rich and dynamic resource not only for the kids in our class but for future students and outside visitors with an interest in the topic. I think it gives a totally different feel to the classroom, one where students not only learn but teach. One where contribution is celebrated. One where the different mediums create entry points for all students and makes them creators, not consumers. Put these tools in the hands of kids with a teacher who understands how to choreograph the interaction and it could be an amazing learning environment.

Paper just seems so restrictive anymore, doesn’t it?
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