Last year I posted an article here at Media Infusion called “Four Weeks to a Flatter You.” The theme of the post was that the world is indeed becoming smaller as Thomas Friedman suggested in The World is Flat, and I provided a 4-week regimen to help teachers prepare themselves with skills necessary for constructing 21st Century classrooms. This year, I’d like to follow up that article on “Web 2.0 Self-improvement” with tools for “Web 2.0 Us-improvement.” I’ve put together another 4-week course to help us move further along the journey. We’ll examine the idea of how — because of the Internet — culture (and business) is changing through crowdsourcing and how we can take advantage of this phenomenon to transform and democratize our classrooms.

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“C’mon everyone, let’s head back to the lab.” The group of middle school students and their teacher begin a short walk back to their school. Clipboards, data sheets, and water quality instruments are tucked safely in their backpacks. When they return to class, they upload the data that they gathered, including water temperature, pH, and the picture that they took of their study site. All this information is entered onto a web page where students from other schools have shared similar data from their locales. Learning experiences like this connect students to their local environment and to each other through real-world projects. The use of technology helps bring these lessons to life in ways that are relevant to students.

Greetings from IslandWood, a 250-acre residential environmental education center that serves nearly 4,000 students each year. We specialize in environmental education and place-based learning, which we think of as teaching in and about the physical and social space where kids live. A big part of our work at IslandWood is to help classroom teachers find strategies to connect students to their own neighborhood environment and community.

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As a first grade teacher, the majority of my day was spent teaching reading. While some of my students flourished by receiving instruction in reading groups, literacy centers, and journal writing, it was clear that others did not. It was a challenge to figure out methods that would interest and engage my students who needed more than books and practice through traditional teaching methods.

Teaching students to read can be challenging, but providing opportunities for them to hone their skills can be even more difficult. The traditional methods of teaching reading and providing opportunities to practice skills are only effective for a select portion of the population. Today, more teachers are relying on interactive websites because they appeal to the multimedia generation.

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In recent years, the volume and quality of video and online visualizations available to teachers has virtually exploded. Series like the BBC’s Planet Earth and PBS’s Nature provide visually engaging, content-rich experiences that draw and hold students’ attention. Many times, my earth science students have told me about a show they’ve recently seen that related directly to content we were covering in class, and I’ve purchased a number of DVD’s from various providers with the intention of sharing at least part of them with my classes. Sharing this video content in the classroom helps connect your curriculum to the “real world,” providing examples and illustrations that you simply cannot create in your classroom. And when students see that the content they’re studying in the classroom is also the subject of a broadcast TV program, the importance and value of what they are learning is reinforced.

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“Asking questions is a very good way to find out about something.”
– Kermit the Frog

Teachers often find themselves frustrated with trying to find high-quality resources and activities that help their students have multiple exposures to concepts and get feedback on their understanding. In addition, they sometimes express how difficult it is to find engaging activities that their 21st century learners want to do. PBS KIDS and PBS KIDS GO! provide a wide array of resources to help teachers and parents access inquiry activities and games. These allow for multiple exposures to concepts, opportunities for sense-making, and chances to address preconceptions. In isolation, Web resources and TV shows are unlikely to provide sufficient learning opportunities for most children to grasp difficult concepts, but they do provide excellent springboards for educators and parents to use in order to engage young learners in inquiry around key concepts.

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As an elementary music teacher in my twenty-third year of teaching, I have witnessed a huge growth in the use of media and technology in the music classroom. When comparing today’s technologies to those of years past (the tuning fork, ditto-mastered song sheets, scratchy vinyl records on mono turntables), it’s clear that we are living in an exciting time to teach music. For so many of us, the technologies seem to change faster than we can catch up with the learning curve of the previous technology. And it can be difficult to choose a technology worth the investment of time and resources without any guarantee that it will still be in vogue three years down the road. One recent development that has had a huge impact on my teaching is the ability to record each of my 600+ students using the MP3 format. The focus of this post is using MP3 recordings during classroom music time as an authentic assessment tool for each of your students. I will also cover a variety of great teaching resources for music and content-area classrooms. Throughout the month, your comments may direct us to additional media and technology tools that enhance teaching and learning in the elementary music classroom.

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Imagine that you are a high school junior. You sit in nervous anticipation with your classmates in a crowded auditorium filled with almost 2,000 people. They have come with one purpose in mind: to see your homework.

You reflect upon all of the painstaking labor you have put into your project. You remember that moment, like it was frozen in time, when the kernel of an idea started to form far back in the recesses of your mind. The excitement built as you started to assemble the pieces. You were challenged to conceptualize, plan, synthesize, develop, and build your masterpiece from the ground up. As a student, you began to take ownership in your education. You became engaged in the learning process. Oh yes, there were challenges along the way. However, now that you think about it, those were the life experiences that forced you to learn the most.

Now you sit, anxiously waiting to see and hear the audience’s reaction to your work. Thousands of people have come to cheer you on and celebrate your achievements. The lights dim, and the show begins.

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When I asked the 7th graders to write about their goals for our summer program for at-risk English Learners, I expected something along the lines of “Get better at reading,” or “Learn more math.” Marco, who arrived in Houston from Cuba one day before the program began, wrote one line: “Yo quiero triunfar en este país” (“I want to triumph in this country”). It struck me then that English Learners’ first experience of a foreign language and a foreign culture is deeply shaped by their first experience of school. A teacher’s responsibility is weighty enough — I still think back on my first-year class of 4th graders and hope that they somehow made it in life despite my first-year fumbling. How much weightier it is for those of us who teach kindergartners from China, 8th graders from Mexico, and high-school students from Afghanistan.

We know that, on one hand, our students need the same thing from us that all kids need from their teacher — the new three R’s, rigor, relevance, and relationship, augmented by the fourth R that my friends who teach art and music remind me to include: richness. My 2nd graders, all born in either Mexico or the Marshall Islands, need a rigorous curriculum in math, science, and every other subject — even those kids who are still in the silent stage. They need a curriculum that’s relevant to their lives — and while a unit on “El Día de los Muertos” is great, sometimes a unit on Pokemon or Dragonball-Z is more relevant. They need that often-dismissed but essential relationship with a caring adult, who will respect them and listen to them. And they need richness — immersion in all the color and passion of literary and artistic works, some that reflect their culture and some that are as foreign to me as to them.

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Not too long ago, my husband and I were watching clips from “The Best of the Electric Company” on our local public television station. Both of us are of the generation raised on Sesame Street and The Electric Company, and it was amazing how many of the skits and songs we remember. Who can forget Letter Man, with his endearing one-liners, always ready to save the day by having the perfect letter available on his varsity sweater? Or the two silhouettes forming words with common diphthongs and digraphs as a groovy tune played in the background (Ch…air…chair)? Or the Pointer Sisters singing the pinball counting song (One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ELEVEN, TWELVE!)? My all-time favorite was Easy Reader, played by Morgan Freeman, who was the archetype of coolness — bell-bottoms, disco ball, and all!

What was also apparent to me as an adult and educator that evening was the educational quality of was happening behind the scenes — carefully and artistically crafted stories, characters, and settings that match a child’s world view and are designed to align to a solid curriculum framework and specific learning goals. In the March issue of Media Infusion, I outlined the many literacy resources available on the PBS Teachers Web site and how these multimedia tools can play a pivotal role in motivating young learners and giving them crucial practice time to learn essential reading skills. This month, PBS is bringing a plethora of new content to kids, parents and educators!

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I don’t know about you, but after watching this video a few times, I could almost agree with Ma and Pa’s conclusions. Where the Kettles and so many others falter in math is in viewing math as a set of facts, instead of as a way to make meaning of the world around them. Yes, there are certain mathematical facts that must be memorized, but if the facts have not been built on a foundation of trial, inquiry, and discovery, then math becomes no more than a routine set of calculations, where errors may go unrecognized. Rote memory cannot be transferred as a way of thinking that leads to active, purposeful problem solving.

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April 22nd is Earth Day, the day set aside to celebrate the gains we have made in protecting our environment and to advance new ideas for continuing the effort to clean up the earth. As I was preparing new Earth Day lesson plans for my environmental science and earth science students, I realized that the tools I needed to accomplish the task were at my fingertips. I just needed to select and use them.

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