Margaret's+breached+wall

Westtown Project

Summer 2007 as a part of our professional development program I read Tom Friedman's //The World is Flat// while my husband (Math and Computer Science teacher) read Daniel Pink's //A Whole New Mind//. Both books confirmed the direction my own teaching and that of a few of my colleagues was already heading. In November 2007 I attended a Heidi Hayes Jacobs workshop and attended a session on using Ning in the classroom. I had never heard about Ning. That winter 2008 I created a Ning for my two history classes. The idea was to provide a forum for students to share thoughts about current events in an arena bigger than my individual sections of 13 students and 15 students. From this small beginning the current events Ning has grown to 10 sections, 170 members.

My work draws on some of the skills outlined by [|the Partnership for 21st Century Skills] > > > > > In general students are expected to contribute an original summary and analysis of two news stories a term. Students are expected to reply to other student's posts 4-7 times a term. Each teacher has his or her own requirements for their students. For instance, our Latin American History requires all orginal story summaries to be on articles about topics in Latin America. Our Hiroshima to 9/11 teacher requires that each student post on topics in the Middle East. For my history classes in the fall I required my students to use news sources based outside of the US such as [|Al Jazeera] or [|the Hindustan Times]. A few students read papers in the language they were studying (for which their language teacher gave a bit of credit). This spring I have shifted the focus to blogs and editorials and have encouraged my students to focus on news masher sites such as [|Huffington Post]and [|The Daily Beast]. > > This past year we have experimented with creating class groups as a means of posting assignments and holding class specific conversations. We learned a number of important lessons, such as what happens in the group, stays in the group. To track what our students are doing requires checking both the group and their own home page as activity within the group is not reflected on a student's home page. However, groups allow for more focused and topic specific discussions. Interestingly, the Graphic Novels and Culture Group was started for 11 juniors in two sections of history working on a project while the seniors were away. Since the project ended other students have asked to join the group and it is beginning to develop its own little, totally independent from any specific assignment, ongoing discussion. > > > > > As faculty we monitor our own students' posts, do our own assessing and participate in the conversations with our students. Our goals are to increase our students' awareness of the world around them. For some of us as faculty, we would love it if our students would cover the stories we think are most important or comment. For others of us, philosophically we are willing to "trade" content control for exposure to different news sources and tapping into their own interests. > > Most recently students have been having a lively debate on a recent [|Huffington Post blog on how to make teens smarter]. Comments included some of the following:
 * Global Awareness
 * Civic Literacy
 * Critical Thinking
 * Communicate Clearly
 * Collaborate with Others
 * Information Literacy
 * Media Literacy
 * Social and Cross
 * Cultural Skills Interact Effectively with Others
 * "This is a topic that I think about somewhat frequently. Personally, I would like to read "intelligent" books and literature that can improve my life and education, but it is not something I usually have time to do. In addition to that, with the rigor of academics and the hectic pace of our usual teenage lives, it is nice to take a break and read something that doesn't require so much in-depth analysis like most prized literature does".
 * "I think in general as a generation we are moving away from physically reading a book.... more often than not we just read off the internet, look up sparknotes etc. and now that organisations offer online or digital libraries, reading material is more available than ever. despite this, in today's world you don't really have to read unless you actively seek out the experience, which many people don't."
 * "I think that instead of changing the types of genre that people read altogether, it would make more sense to pick out reading material that is both interesting and also provides a well read. I myself enjoy reading about random facts that are presented in a list-styled format and read these from a website that i frequent. Not only am I presented with reading that I find interest, but the reading also provides me with words and writing structures which I think are a bit higher than my normal reading level."

Another student reported on a [|Daily Beast Blog "The Need for Nuclear Weapons"]. The student poster agreed with the author and worried that the President's plan would leave the US vulnerable. The student was all for reducing stockpiles and de-commissioning out of date weapons, he just wanted the US to keep developing new weapons. What made this an interesting post is that several students went back to the source and noticed that there were links to to other bloggers posts on this very topic. Further informed students began chiming in with
 * "On the one hand, these reductions do not really change anything in regards to functionality of global nuclear arsenals. On the other hand, it represents a willingness to move past the psychological remnants of the 20th century and the Cold War. In foreign relations, reducing nuclear arsenals represents the leveling of the playing field, since nuclear weapons have been a powerful international status symbol since Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
 * "There is absolutely no reason for the U.S. to end their nuclear weapon program. We need to be able to defend ourselves and we cannot do that sufficiently if we are using outdated and ineffective weapons. All other countries will see this as an opportunity to get ahead of and possibly attack the U.S. We would, and should, do the same if another country dropped it's nuclear weapons program."

This year my intention was to take this experiment in the creation of professional/personal learning networks and expand even further to develop a partnership with another teacher or teachers beyond Westtown. My vision was to recreate our Ning experience beyond Westtown. I did have some limited previous experience in this. Spring 2008, a young department member and I experimented with a project involving her Latin American History class and a history class at Markham College, Lima, Peru. I had gotten acquainted with a few of the teachers at Markham when I helped chaperone a few of our students at a Round Square Conference the previous February. The project the adults devised was to consider the impact of cocaine trafficking from the points of view of the two different sets of students. The students spent a week researching and then we arranged for a SKYPE conference. The internet was laggy and the students had challenges sharing microphones, but all in all the students wanted to do it again. Then Julia (my younger colleague) went back to graduate school and the Markham contact moved on as well.

I had hoped to use the resources Kim Cofino shared with us as well as leveraging Westtown's membership in Round Square to develop a new relationship with another teacher interested in developing and sustaining ongoing projects. We also have sister school relationships in Japan and Ghana which provided possibilities as well.

What follows is a bit of a log of my efforts to make a connection: 2/13/2010 Valentines Day, a day for making connections! I sent an email to a man named Mikey McKillip, he teaches in Tanzania. Kim Cofino our PLP expert on Global Collaborations recommended him. I posted my idea for a project on either Africa in the 14th and 15th centuries or World War I on the Global Ed Collaborative Ning. I responded to a teacher at Chestnut Hill Academy looking for collaborators as well.

I have my fingers crossed!!

2/15/2010 Today I heard from Mikey McKillip. He teaches 4th graders but sent my email onto friends of his who teach high school. I also emailed Melissa Graf-Evans, a Westtown Colleague for ideas on Ramallah Friends then I used one of Kim Cofino's international school's lists and sent emails to Heads of School at international/american schools in a number of places

2/16 I emailed the head of school, Joyce Aljouny, at Ramallah Friends.

2/25 Joyce Aljouny got back in touch with me. She is the only one so far. She said she would share my email with the Ramallah Friends HOS! Jorge Jidrobo a colleague of mine at Westtown will be in Ecuador this spring. He is going see if he can find a contact for me.

3/1 I sent a general email request out to my Westtown faculty and a few suggested they had contacts they would pursue for me.

3/22 I still need to find a partner. I will resend to Joyce Aljouny and press forward with Steve Compton our Round Square Rep and send an email out to my Westtown colleagues again asking for help.

4/1 I have decided to submit applications to both the Flat Classroom Project (whose Ning I have joined) and NAIS Project 20/20. In the meantime, I have joined Twitter, expanded my knowledge of Google.docs and met with my own Westtown History Department Colleagues to assess how to take our own student's work in Ning to the next level.

In summary: I still don't have a partner, but I have leads, I have the means now for having a known quantity such as the Flat Classroom Project or NAIS act as faciltator. And while I still haven't accomplished the goal of finding a partner, I now have a better sense of the range of tools and the types of projects that work when connecting students asychronously and/or digitally from different parts of the globe.