But who will see it when I’m done?
By Deborah Lawrence, MACUL Grant Recipient GOING DIGITAL: A YEAR OF LEARNING…BEGINNING WITH THE AUDIENCE In
my experience the best classroom-projects, digital or otherwise, will never become the whopping successes that we want them to be unless they matter not only to us as educators with our list of state standards,
but also to our students. Yes, having projects that meet state standards and teacher outcomes is crucial, but the planning for our projects cannot end there. So what recipe can we follow to ensure that a project matters to our students? How do we get kids “bought in” and fully engaged? As educators, we know that there are many ways. We can provide choice…and we should. We can infuse our projects with creativity…and we should. We can expound to our students the wonderful skills that they will acquire throughout the journey that the project will take them on… and we should. We can set up wonderful collaborative structures…and we should. But time and time again what my students wanted to know in this past year of creating digital projects, no matter what their age, was an answer to the question: “But who will see it when I’m done?”
Like all human beings, students have a very basic need for recognition of their work. Nothing provides that great feeling of accomplishment more than someone they respect taking notice, and a long hard look at the work that has been done. The sharing of a classroom project with an audience that matters to our students immediately inspires them and ups the ante for that whopping success that we’re shooting for. After all, we live in a time where students go public digitally with their ideas as part of their everyday life and use varying media types and websites to do so. It should be no surprise to us that our digital-native-students won’t be satisfied with their work staying inside their classroom walls.
MACULJOURNAL |
Thankfully in our 2.0 world there are a plethora of excellent websites for delivering classroom projects to our students’ elected audiences. Voicethread, Wikispaces, Weebly, Wix, Glogster, Animoto and Jaycut, just to name a few, are great sites to choose from, but are only a small representation of what is out there. “Great, we say! We love choices, we shout!” Yet, therein also lays the problem: The Plethora!
“The Plethora” must be sorted through. This is most certainly a time-consuming task and can undoubtedly feel insurmountable given all of the other pieces that must fall into place to deliver a quality digital project for our students. Not only does the publishing of our project need to fit the bill for reaching the chosen audience, it also needs to fit both the teacher’s timeline and skill-set, the students’ skill-set, and what the district has the technology and technological support to employ. To top it all off, our tech savvy students often have very strong ideas about the perfect website to use which can also be the very same site that is beholden to firewall challenges and parental consent forms. Reaching the intended audience can be complicated at the least. “It’s too complicated. Who has the time?” we could say. However, we as teachers must take the time to make the best choice possible before we dive in. In my experience in this past year, if my students as a community of learners could not share their work with whom they desired, the air left their 2.0-sails very rapidly and I ended having to backtrack and re-route their work to fit our circular project into a square hole. This wasted everyone’s valuable time and left me frustrated and feeling less authentic in my ability as the teacher; it left my students confused; and their audience, i.e. parents, in a holding pattern waiting to see the evidence of their son’s or daughter’s 21st
century work. Winter 2011-12 |
“Going Digital” continued on page 33
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