So what do you do if you are a student in Nashua, NH and along with your community, you’re staring a teacher walkout in the face?
Well, you put together a whole slew of Read/Write Web tools and get ready to cover the event, everything from a Facebook group to a video channel to a blog. Here is the deal according to the Facebook page:
A team of students from both Nashua High Schools, skilled in video production, computer editing, webcasting, and Internet social networking have established an off-campus production center to keep the community informed, moment-to-moment, in the event of a Nashua Teacher’s Union job action. The student center will webcast daily, upload video interviews and other footage constantly. The team will employ video chat, instant messaging, and social networking activity through sites such as Facebook to keep in touch with their audience.
And the kids seem to get what the possibilities are:
“What people don’t see is how this situation is impacting the students.” said Korey O’Brien, producer. “We have first amendment rights, and as citizens in a democracy have an obligation to get involved.” O’Brien believes that students can be objective: “Given the extreme opinions on both sides that I’ve read about in the newspaper, it should be easy for us to offer a more reasonable viewpoint. If we broadcast the student’s perspective, perhaps our voices will affect how the issue is resolved.”
They’ve got over 230 members in the Facebook group since Thursday, a half a dozen videos up already, and according to Nicole Tomaselli who sent me the link, they’ve got quite a following already.
The Nashua teachers have been modeling the uses of these tools for quite some time. I’ve had a link to their YouTube channel on my presentation wiki for over a year now. (Check out this video from their “Education Worth Paying For” series.) I have no idea if these kids have been “taught” to use these tools for the intended purpose or if they’ve recognized it on their own, but I think this is an amazingly cool example of kids doing real work for real audiences, the same audiences which will, in the end, assess the effectiveness of their work.
So where is this in your currciulum?