Digication Blog

We can't get enough of teaching and learning success stories here at Digication. We would like to share an article with you that we found on the Infinite Thinking Machine website (www.infinitethinking.org) recently.

This article introduces a 10th grade Computer Science classroom and a 6th grade Language Arts classroom, both incidentally in the Southeast U.S., Georgia and South Carolina respectively.

Both classrooms have put the community building aspects of Web 2.0 technology like wikis, Skype, and podcasting to work in the classroom with dramatic, positive impact on the educational experience of their students.

Their students are engaged, excited, connected, motivated, and HAVING FUN WHILE LEARNING! And they are not just learning about the subject matter introduced in these courses, but are rather gaining significant skills in other areas including technology, effective communication (not just in their classrooms, but with students in other countries!), creative expression, collaboration - the list goes on and on. Isn't that what school should be all about?

Huge pats on the back to Vicki Davis and Chris Craft, the teachers making this all possible for their students.

There’s a great post over at Technology & Learning's TechLearning Blog http://www.techlearning.com/blog/main/.

Jeff Utecht discusses the popularity of Myspace and YouTube among students associating it with their ability to create and manage their own content. Take a look at this link. One of my big pushes as an educator is to motivate my students to create excellent work and to also share and publish that work with a greater community, whether that community is a group of peers within a classroom, the entire class, the department, the school, or even the world.

I have always found it important that students are creating work not just for me to see in order to get feedback but for them to also have the opportunity to hear from other people and learn from the greater community.

My students take a lot of pride in the work that they create knowing that they will be publishing it to a bigger audience and that the work has value to others beyond the class.