Blogtoberfest, Day 25: Mike Starr

How have connections with other professionals improved your practice? Today's entry is from Mike Starr, Social Science Teacher at Carmel Valley Middle School:

It’s Blogtoberfest, so let’s have a bleer…ok, ok, was it that blad? Please stop? Ok, ok. :)

How have connections with other professionals improved your practice?

My thanks go out to Kevin Fairchild and Shea Starr who collaborated/taught me how to use Blackboard to the degree that I could run a 21st Century skills and Common Core based essay project for my 7th grade World History students at Carmel Valley Middle School. According to Edweek.com, “21st-century skills" is generally used to refer to certain core competencies such as collaboration, digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving that advocates believe schools need to teach to help students thrive in today's world”. There were many aspects of Blackboard that I learned about that made the project 21st Century learning and Common Core based. First, the project was entirely digital and paperless! In past years, I passed out essay instruction slips to each student and had them turn in a typed essay. Kevin and Shea taught me how to create classes in Blackboard, add students, how to create a unit folder, and post the instructions of the project in a content page. The students read the instructions online. As part of the Social Studies Common Core W2 “Use formatting, graphics, and multimedia to aid comprehension”, I assigned the students to write their essay in a multimedia format of their choice. Many created Google docs, Prezis, PowerPoints, and there were even a couple of amazing Powtoons. In the past, I had the students use the texbook and their parents as the sole source of evidence supporting their argument. This year, students were additionally expected to back up their arguments by also finding appropriate graphics and secondary source quotes found on the Internet. Kevin helped me set up Discussion Groups in Blackboard. This was so that students could post their finished projects to Blackboard. I was excited for this component of the project, which asked the students to post their project to Blackboard, read two of their peers’ posted projects, and post a reply back to them in the Discussion Group’s thread. The reply was structured and asked students to pose a solution to one on the problems the United States is facing that their peer had written about (online literacy and problem-solving). The resulting project had students completely engaged in creating their multimedia presentations and researching secondary sources and finding graphics on the Internet. A few students had problems losing information and using their time inappropriately playing with their multimedia software too much and not focusing on research and typing their essay. Overall, however, the excitement of the students, their interaction with digital media, and the critical thinking shown in their final product far outweighed the few problems that arose. I could not have run this project digitally without the assistance of Kevin, whose summer Blackboard training was where I designed my unit and set up the discussion board. It also would have been much more confusing without Shea’s help answering numerous Blackboard questions and helping me look at the project from a student’s perspective.