As I wrote a week ago, some of our ninth graders are currently involved in a project based on Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind. On Thursday, January 15th, our students will be discussing Chapter 4 (Design) of A Whole New Mind with Daniel Pink (see the wiki for the schedule of the discussions over the other chapters). Mr. Pink is graciously giving us two hours of his time, so Anne Smith’s two classes will be discussing with him during second period (8:25 – 9:24 am, MST) and Maura Moritz’s two classes will be discussing during third period (9:29 – 10:30 am, MST). During each period, the two classes of students will gather in the library, and an "inner circle" of students will ask questions of and interact with Daniel Pink via Skype. The students in the "outer circle" will be watching that as well as live blogging on their respective class blogs (Anne Smith's class blog, Maura Moritz's class blog).
In addition, we will try to stream video and audio of the live discussion out via ustream. If everything is working, you can go to our ustream channel and watch and listen live to the students interacting with Mr. Pink. Please keep in mind, however, that the ustream is a bonus, we will be focusing on making sure Skype and the live blogging is working, so if there are any technical issues with the ustream we won’t be spending very much time trying to troubleshoot those. (Please also know that the ustream chat does not always make it through our firewall, so we probably won’t be reading or monitoring that.) Anyone who's interested is invited to watch the live blogs and/or the ustream.
It will be interesting to see how this first discussion goes. Last year the students didn't interact with Daniel Pink until Chapter 7, so they were very much into the book, the discussions, and had experience interacting with remote live bloggers. Since they are just beginning their study of the book and its concepts at this point, we'll see if that affects their level of engagement and the quality of their discussions. In any event, we're looking forward to an engaging and rewarding learning experience for our students.
I enjoyed listening to your program remotely. Your students did an excellent job with their questions. A few of Mr. Pink's answers surprised me.
ReplyDeleteThanks for letting us listen.
Jim
Thank you SO much on the head's up for this - I don't think that my son would have told me about it and my husband and I (at different locations)really enjoyed listening and watching and reading (the live blog). What great thoughtful questions the kids asked too! Thanks for the tip on this today.
ReplyDeleteLaura
Karl, I was able to listen to the first group of students today. They were very well prepared for the conversation, their questions were well though out, I was very impressed with what I heard. The students who were using live blogging seemed to be very engaged in their discussions as well, they all seemed very focused. Congratulations to Ann, Maura and all of the students involved. I am going to use this blog post to share with teachers in my own district, to show what is possible today. Thank you all very much.
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