What if your students wrote about what it’s like to be their shoes for a day? What if you as the teacher wrote from that point of view and then had your students comment as if they were their shoes?
__________
What would a scatter graph of earthquake activity worldwide look like? What if your students took the raw data from the internet, used it to create a spreadsheet, and created the graph from it? (Idea unashamedly stolen from David Warlick’s presentation at TCEA ) What if your geography class was doing this web project and the math or BCIS classes decided to particpate?
__________
What if you blogged about how advertisers use different techniques to get us to buy their products and then assigned groups of students to find examples of commercials that use those techniques and have them report on their findings in the comment section of you blog.
A good video commercial example can be found here.
What if you checked your blog and found that students were reading and submitting comments at 8:30 at night or 7:10 in the morning - outside of school hours?
__________
What if your class was having blog discussions about an assigned book and the author submits a comment and becomes part of the discussion? That’s what happened to a class that was reading and blogging on “The Secret Life Of Bees”.
__________
What if you could record your class lecture, edit it, and upload the audio file to your blog where students could access it if they missed your class or just wanted to review? What if you could then have that lesson to use next year? What if a parent wanted to know what their child was doing in class and could access the podcast from home? What if a community member who happened to be in a job related to your lesson read the blog and contacted you about become involved with your project?
__________
These are just a few of the possibilities - there are many more. You may already have some ideas of your own. You can share them. You can create the content on the web that your students can access. You can help them to learn appropriate ways to create web content. You can have ongoing conversations with your students that extend beyond the regular school hours and beyond the school walls. I hope you will add your voice, I hope you will give your students a voice.
