Parents, We Would Love Your Input . . .

Michele Davis had a great post on her ninth grade blog the other day. It was for her students, but she didn't ask them to comment. Instead, she asked their parents to.

Parents, one of our focuses this semester is writing persuasively. We start with an effective paragraph with strong topic sentences and move to a multi-paragraph persuasive essay, literary analysis essay, narrative writing, poetry, summaries, and online writing.

We would love your input on how writing is important in your line of work.

Some good, thoughtful comments from the parents on the importance of good writing, and a great way to get parents engaged with the work their students are doing at school.

This I Believe Goes Global

[cross-posted on Learning and Laptops - the "I" in this post is Anne Smith]

For the past two years, I have had my classes write their versions of National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” segment. I was introduced to this idea by a colleague and have been always impressed by what my students hold as their personal values and beliefs. Writing these essays has allowed for them to do something they don’t get to do all that often at school - express their heartfelt beliefs. After writing the essays the first year, we submitted them to NPR, but we also decided to podcast them ourselves – no need to wait to see if NPR might choose to broadcast them. The writing was good at expressing their values, but once their voice was added to their written expression, WOW, it simply transformed that personal essay. Instead of the words simply being words, the words conveyed deeply held emotions. Now, this is the standard.

Previous class examples:

Period 2 06-07
Period 5 06-07
Period 3 06-07
Period 2 07-08
Period 5 07-08
Period 3 07-08

We are approaching that time of year, when I am going to start the kids on this writing adventure, but this year I wanted to add a little twist with the help of you out there in the blog-o-sphere. I want “This I Believe” to go global. I want my students to benefit not only from knowing what their peers believe, or what the other AHS classes believe, but to hear and see what the world values. What do kids elsewhere in the U.S. believe in? What do kids elsewhere in the world believe in? What do some of the learned professionals that I know believe in? I want my students to walk away from this experience realizing the power they have as professional writers as well as connecting to other teenagers and adults from around the world. I want to see them exchange ideas, foster relationships, and appreciate the variety of perspectives.

So, how do we accomplish this? Karl Fisch, of course, is willing to be my master facilitator. He has set up a wiki (still a work in progress) that will provide the guidelines for the classes to follow. I am making Maura Moritz’s classes join us in this experience, too, so there will be four classes (ninth grade, 14 and 15 years old) from AHS writing and podcasting their essays: Moritz 3, Moritz 4, Smith 2, and Smith 5. We are hoping to attract at least three other classes from around the world, one each to pair up with each of our four classes. If we get more than four classes that are interested, then we will try to pair up any additional classes with another class somewhere in the world. If your class(es) are interested, email Karl with some basic information (your name, school name, location, grade level(s)/ages, how many classes, and time frame that you’d like to do this) so we can setup those partnerships. (Our thinking is that pairing one class with one class will keep this from becoming too overwhelming for the students, although of course anyone can read/listen/comment to any of the essays on any of the wiki pages).

We will create a wiki page for each set of paired classes and each student will upload their written essay as well as their podcast (the podcast can either be uploaded directly to the wiki, or you can use a variety of other services for that and then link to them). Each pair of classes will be in charge of their own wiki page and we’ll use the discussion tabs on each page to give feedback to the students. If you are an adult interested in writing a piece yourself, simply add them to the “adults” page on the wiki. I am hoping to get some notable edubloggers as well as my superintendent, CIO, and others to participate. It would also be helpful to include a brief bio so the kids can know who they are reading about.

Obviously you don’t have to do this with us or on our wiki, you can create your own. But we thought it might be interesting and helpful to have one wiki that aggregated all these essays/podcasts, one place that students (and others) could visit to learn about beliefs all over the world.

Wondering where to start? NPR has a number of education friendly links to help you along the process:

For Educators
For Students
Essay writing tips
How to contribute an essay to NPR

Timeline: For our classes we are going to start writing our essays, November 6th with a final due date of November 14th. The following week they will begin podcasting their essays. The paired classes don’t have to match this timeline exactly (although that would be great), but we’re hoping they can have theirs completed by the first week of December so that the students can start commenting on each other’s essays/podcasts.

But for other pairings you can set whatever time frame works best for you – that’s the beauty of the wiki, it’s a living document with no “end” to the assignment (although that’s why we need you to include your time frame when you email us so that we can try to match folks up). We would really appreciate any feedback (now or as this progresses) to make this an experience that is truly relevant and meaningful for these kids.

Let's Go to the Polls

No, this isn't an appeal to get all of you to vote (although, seriously, you should if you haven't already). Anne Smith's freshmen recently began a unit that includes Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron". Anne decided to get some discussions started before they started reading Harrison Bergeron:

The following day, before we read Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”, I used Polleverywhere.com to create an in-class texting poll asking them to submit their answers to the following questions. The paired up in class with one other student who had free, unlimited texting and then once I put up the poll question, they text in their answer, after discussing the possibilities together. It was AWESOME! The twosome discussed their answer, then we took sides in class. I had one participant be the voice of the yes, no, or maybe on each question presenting their case, and then opened it up to the entire class for discussion. They were so into it, it was challenging to bring them back to move onto the next question. Talk about motivated learners.

What were the questions? Statements like: History books are accurate. Censorship is never justified. People should always obey the law. Visit the post to read all the statements and the results of the polls. (Note: You'll need PowerPoint 2007 to open the polls and you have to actually run the slideshow to see the question and the results.)

Update on AHS Chemistry Podcasts - Physics, Too!

Just a quick post to update you on Brian Hatak's AHS Chemistry Podcasts that I blogged about previously. Some of the technological issues have begun to get ironed out and overall things are going well. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of improvements to be made - there are, but things are going well enough that now Jeff Smith, an AP Physics teacher, is doing the same thing.

Brian also asked his students to provide some feedback on how things are going, which we'll use to hopefully make improvements. Brian also wrote an article that will be appearing soon in ISTE's Learning & Leading with Technology magazine, so look for that in the near future.

What Matters? (to each character - and to ninth graders)

In Anne Smith's English 9 class they are viewing everything they read and do through the lens of the question, "What Matters?"

So far, we have read Jack London's "To Build a Fire" , excerpts from Thoreau's Walden, and connected those two to Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. With each piece we read, we take some time to reflect and connect. We have tried to examine what really matters to each of these characters.

The students have created Google Earth files to document their journey so far. Head on over, download and take a look at some of the kmz files, and leave some constructive criticism.

WWSD: What Would Shakespeare Do?

No, don’t worry, this is not a reprise of that post. Anne Smith had her ninth graders complete a word trace from Acts 2 and 3 of Macbeth:

Through our study of acts 2-3 of Macbeth, the kids were put into groups looking at the use of one of the following words: blood, hand, man, night, sleep.

. . . I asked the kids this year to demonstrate their learning using any way BUT PPT . . .

I let my grad school buddies know of this, and Gary Stager our teacher, asked my students to think about the project this way: What Would Shakespeare Do?

After a few presentations today, we debriefed after each one discussing did their presentation merely distribute information or did they go above and beyond the expectations to really show WWSD? I asked the groups that gave a literal interpretation to spend some more time really pushing our understanding of Shakespeare's use of those words. Why those words? Who says them the most? Are there modern connections? What connections can you make between the uses of the words? and being creative with their interpretations. I am anxious to see them progress with their thinking.

The students came up with a variety of presentations including writing a sonnet of their own about Shakespeare's use of 'hand' and connecting it to a Good Charlotte song, creating a rap rendition about 'night' and connecting it to Mission Impossible, and creating a series of one man plays about his use of 'man'. Head on over, check out the examples, and leave them some constructive criticism.

I also think it's interesting to contemplate what various historical figures would do to communicate their ideas given today's tools, and challenge students (and teachers) to not only imagine that, but try their hand at creating it. What would Shakespeare do?

Censorship in a Time of War: The Devil's Advocate

On Amanda Crosby's class blog The Devil's Advocate (btw, one of my favorite blog names ever - particularly her tag line: Crosby's Position: A teacher's job is not to tell students what to think. A teacher's job is to encourage students TO think.), the students are having a lively discussion about censorship of the media, particularly in time of war. Viewpoints vary widely:

Emily: My opinion is that I think the government should always have the right to censor news media during a time of war. Otherwise, how will we know if the information we are receiving is accurate?

Sarah: The government wouldn't necessarily sensor the media to make sure it is putting out accurate information. They would sensor it to make sure the press didn't put anything they didn't like out there, and what they don't like isn't unreliable information.

As the conversation continues, it's interesting to see students outside of Ms. Crosby's class (which is a 9th grade U.S. History class) jump in. (I don't know all the students, but I know Ben and Hannah are not in the class. Ben and Hannah, if you read this, please leave a comment about how you discovered the Censorship blog post. Was it from the AHS Start Page or the Learning Network page on the AHS website, or word of mouth, or what?)

I think it would be great if readers of this blog who have an opinion on this topic head on over and leave a comment on The Devil's Advocate. I think extending the conversation through additional perspectives would really help the students as they grapple with this complex topic.

Macbeth, Music, Mathematics, and Teaching: Can a Good Teacher Teach Anything from Anything Else?

I recently posted about Anne Smith’s classes creating musical compositions to represent characters in Macbeth. I think you should take another look at the comments on Anne’s post, as the discussion has moved in several different directions since then.

After many comments discussing the process and merits of using music to think more deeply about a literary work, Gary Stager asked this question:

So, do you think one lesson from this experience might be that a good teacher can teach anything from anything else?

The students had some interesting thoughts about that. Some of those thoughts touched on the subject of mathematics, including this comment:

In math, there is one answer and one answer only.

That led me to ask a question about whether the students all agreed with that statement and asked them to think about a couple of "math" problems. Since then Gary chimed in briefly again about math, and Sylvia Martinez has stopped by a couple of times to add to the discussion, but the students have really done the bulk of the commenting.

I think it would be worth your time to read through the discussion (set aside some time, as there are currently 194 comments) and perhaps add a comment with your perspective on the various topics.

Why Math?

James has tasked his students with contacting folks in a profession they'd like to pursue and asking them a few questions about their use of mathematics in their profession. Here are the questions they are asking:

1. How do you use math in your profession? Outside of your profession?
2. Are there any experiences – academic or otherwise - that particularly helped you learn and apply math in your profession?
3. What specific advice would you give to someone thinking about entering your profession if they want to help prepare themselves in the best possible way?
4. Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently as a learner?
5. Please add any additional comments or questions that you feel you would like to share.

I thought that in addition to the great responses they are hopefully going to get back from the folks they contact, some of you might be interested in responding. If you have some thoughts you'd like to share with the students - or know someone else you could pass this along to - please stop by James' blog and leave a comment.

VoiceThread Examples

We used VoiceThread for the first time just before spring break so I thought I’d share these examples. We still have a lot to learn about how to use it well, but I think these are a good start. Anne Smith describes several different poetry projects some of our freshmen completed - you should read the descriptions of the different types of poems as well as follow the links to some of the projects they created using various tools. Here are direct links to the VoiceThread examples in Anne and Maura Moritz’s classes:

Smith Period 2

Moritz Period 3

Moritz Period 4

Smith Period 5

As always, constructive criticism is welcomed, either on Anne’s post or – even better – leave a comment on some of the VoiceThreads.

Stefania Has Some Questions about Empathy

Many of our students have posted questions on their class blog for their "Wikified Research Paper" regarding our explorations of A Whole New Mind. Stefania just posted one as a VoiceThread, so feel free to comment on the blog post or leave a comment on the VoiceThread (embedded below for your convenience, but of course the comments exist on the Voicethread on both posts).

Thinking Creatively

To go along with our AWNM project, I thought this post by Anthony over on Students 2.0 was worth passing along to our students discussing these ideas.

Twenty-first century education won’t be defined by any new technology. It won’t be defined by 1:1 laptop programs or tech-intensive projects. Twenty-first century education will, however, be defined by a fundamental shift in what we are teaching—a shift towards learner-centered education and creating creative thinkers. Today’s world is no longer content with students who can simply apply the knowledge they learned in school: our generation will be asked to think and operate in ways that traditional education has not, and can not, prepare us for.

So, students in Mrs. Smith's and Mrs. Moritz's classes, is Anthony right? (Make sure you read the entire post.) You probably want to comment on his post or, of course, you're welcome to comment here. (Or both!)

Live Blogging AWNM – Round One

As I mentioned in a previous post, four sections of our ninth graders are reading and discussing Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, including live blogging and a videoconference with the author. They are also live blogging with various folks from my learning network as they discuss the six senses that Mr. Pink believes are critical for success in the 21st century.

Last Friday was our first attempt to bring in those outside live bloggers and – for the most part - it worked very well. In the spirit of sharing what works – and what we struggled with – here’s a quick summary.

What Went Well
The technology worked surprisingly well. Sometimes when we’ve done live blogging previously (just the students in the class), Blogger has blocked our IP address after awhile because they thought we were spamming comments (sometimes 200+ comments in 50 minutes that are coming from one IP address). Thankfully, that didn’t happen.

MeBeam worked pretty well, with the only problems being a software update that messed a few folks up, as well as some firewall issues (more on that below). We used MeBeam to stream the audio/video of the inner circle discussion out to the live bloggers. That way they not only followed the comments on the blog, but were able to hear the conversation in the classroom. For those that hooked up their own webcams, it also allowed the students to see what they looked like. (We decided not to bring their audio in, figuring the students had enough to concentrate on.) We used a Logitech webcam for the video, and a Blue Snowball microphone for the audio, with the Snowball pulled into the middle of the discussion using a 15-foot USB extension cable.

As usual, the students did a really nice job with the both the in-class discussion and the live blogging discussion (with one exception that I’ll talk about below). Our remote bloggers were incredible. Thanks to Dean Shareski, Darren Draper, Julie Lindsay, Jeff Whipple, Sharon Peters, James Folkestad, Sylvia Martinez, Karen Janowski and Tim Stahmer for your participation, your probing questions, and your willingness to devote time to this. We - and our students - really appreciate it.

What Didn’t Go Well
MeBeam updated their software a couple of days before we did this. As part of that upgrade, they implemented a “motion detection” system so that people didn’t use up their bandwidth with a webcam pointed at a wall or something. If it doesn’t sense any motion for about 10 seconds, it kicks you out of the room. But that meant that if folks trying to tune in to the MeBeam broadcast didn’t have a webcam connected, it booted them out. Luckily MeBeam still has their “original style” available that works without the motion detection system. I found that out the day before, but didn’t get that communicated to everyone in time. Since the feedback from the remote bloggers is that hearing the in-class discussion was really helpful, that was not ideal for those folks that couldn’t connect. Hopefully this week we’ll do better. Also, at least one remote blogger had firewall issues that wouldn’t allow him to connect to MeBeam. MeBeam uses Flash and a pretty standard port, but apparently not standard enough.

While for the most part the student discussion was really good, they did get off-topic a little more than I expected. From previous fishbowl discussions I’ve seen them conduct, they usually do an excellent job of staying on topic. I think the difference was mostly because it was a non-fiction book, and that threw them a little bit. I wanted them to focus mostly on the concept of Design, but they spent more of their time on right brain/left brain issues. I still think it was a great discussion in all four sections, but that’s something we can hopefully improve on this week (focusing on Story this week).

What I Still Wonder About
Sylvia gave us some thoughtful feedback asking if we had thought about exploring the science of right brain/left brain a little bit more, since the extreme dichotomy of “the left brain does this, the right brain that” has been somewhat discredited. (My reading of the science is that each hemisphere is still “specialized” and operates differently, but that the interplay is very complex.) To be honest, I was more focused on the six senses and not the science, and wasn’t that worried about the science because Pink was using it as a metaphor, not a scientific “fact.” For me (and this is just me), I want to explore the usefulness and applicability of the six senses to today’s students, both in a school setting and beyond. I feel like schools are pretty “L-directed” (to use Pink’s term where he tries to avoid the “left brain” idea) and that we need to incorporate more “R-directed” activities and even policies into our schools. Not everyone agrees that that is the case, of course, but I think it’s worth exploring. But Sylvia’s comments make me question whether we should’ve expanded this project even more to include the science, and I wonder how we could’ve done that effectively (or possibly could do it effectively in the future). So if folks have suggestions – or links to good resources that explore this further – please leave a comment.

You can read Anne Smith’s and Maura Moritz’s reflection on how last week went, as well as posts by Darren, Julie and Sharon with their thoughts. If you’d like to read through the live blog posts, here are the four sections (Period 2, Period 3, Period 4, Period 5). And Dan Pink has chimed in with a question for our students (on Anne’s class blog, on Maura’s class blog).

Overall, I think it was a very successful start to the project. We’re hoping that with some tweaks to the process (like sending better MeBeam instructions to the remote bloggers) and a reminder to the students to stay more on the topic of the particular chapter they are discussing, that this week will be even better. This week we’re looking forward to hearing from two of our school board members, Dan Maas (our CIO), Kristin Hokanson, Miguel Guhlin, Ben Wilkoff, Lori Soifer (a school board trustee in Michigan), Christian Long and Jim Gates.

Jose Has Some Questions

Jose is a ninth grader in one of Anne Smith's classes participating in the A Whole New Mind project. He's looking for some input regarding outsourcing, automation and abundance, so he decided to create a survey.

While I do have some questions about his questions - some are a little unclear to me - I thought that this was an excellent approach to gathering some data to help inform his thinking. Feel free to take the survey or leave a comment asking questions about his survey.

Think Pink: A Whole New Learning Experience

Maura Moritz and Anne Smith have just begun an interesting project with four sections of their ninth grade honors language arts students (Maura's class blog, Anne's class blog.) The students are reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, discussing it in class, and then writing a thesis driven persuasive essay built around one of Pink’s six senses (Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, or Meaning).

As part of their discussions in class, the students will participate in a fishbowl discussion with live blogging. This is something they’ve done previously (although this is the first time with a non-fiction book), but this time they’ll have some additional participants in their live blogging – including the author. When the students discuss and live blog Chapter 7 (Empathy), Daniel Pink will be live blogging it with them. In addition, after finishing the entire book, the students will participate in a live videoconference with Mr. Pink.

Since Mr. Pink is presumably a very busy guy, he will only be live blogging that one chapter with the students. So we’ve invited a few other folks to live blog the other “Sense” chapters with the students. This includes local folks like our superintendent, our CIO, and two of our school board members, but also includes a variety of folks from around the world that are members of my personal learning network. (Thanks to everyone who agreed to participate. We didn’t want too many and tried to get gender balance and at least some geographic distribution, but of course time zone differences cause some problems there.)

As the students progress through their study of the book and its related concepts, they will also keep a Personal Learning Journal (some will do it online, others will keep it more private). They will:

reflect on the process of reading AWNM, relate the book to your own personal lives through a variety of reactions, reflect on your brain assessments, the AWNM video, as well as try one suggested activity within each Sense’s portfolio (Design, Story Symphony, Empathy, Play, Meaning). Also, we will ask you to reflect on how each Sense applies to you personally through your classes and life.

For those of you who haven’t read the book, at the end of each "Sense" chapter Mr. Pink includes some suggested activities that help the reader explore and/or develop that sense further. The students will each choose one of those activities for each chapter, complete it, and then reflect upon it.

When it comes time to write their persuasive essay about one of the Senses, the students will complete a "Wikified Research Paper." They will:

publish your paper in a wiki format, allowing you to use links in your argumentative paper to your actual research and go beyond the limits of the usual typed paper. Students could add data, photos, audio and video links, etc.

The students will also use the wiki for the entire writing process.

I, of course, love this idea, and am excited to see how it goes. As always the first time you try something, I expect there will be glitches along the way, but I still anticipate this being a wonderful learning experience for our students. Whether you particularly like Pink’s book and agree with his arguments or not, I think most folks would agree that these are important concepts for today’s learners to think about. This project will allow them to think much more deeply about these ideas and hear a variety of viewpoints from around the globe – I commend Maura and Anne for taking this on. I particularly like how they close their description of the Wikified Research Paper:

Before you submit your paper, think about this. Normally you would turn your paper in to your teacher and your teacher would provide the commentary and grade your paper. This paper is different. You are producing this paper for the world. Is it good enough for the world to read? Did you submit your best work?

More This I Believe Podcasts

Anne's ninth graders have posted their This I Believe podcasts (links to the text are below the Odeo player) - Period 2 and Period 5. As always, constructive comments are welcome.

If you want to hear more, visit last year's post.

Staff Development - Cross Curricular Suggestions for 12-17 Session

This post is primarily for the folks in our staff development, to solicit some ideas for a future session.

As we mentioned in the session this week, for our December 17th session (that's a Monday in the afternoon after finals) we are going to spend some time on cross-curricular discussions (C1 and C2 together). We will be focusing on cross-curricular teaching, which could be anything from a particular topic, an entire unit, or entire teamed classes.

While we have some ideas of how we could structure this time, we really wanted to hear your ideas of what would work best for you. Please leave a comment below.

Not Your Parents’ Parent-Teacher Conferences

At Arapahoe, we hold parent-teacher conferences in both the fall (two nights) and the spring (one night). Teachers are available from 4:00 until 7:30 each night for 5-7 minute conversations with parents. Parents are strongly encouraged to attend, but it is optional.

Many teachers at Arapahoe have been frustrated by how often those conferences tend to focus on grades, with parents wanting to know what students need to do to get their C to a B, or their B to an A. We are asking our students to really focus on the learning, not the grade, so it’s frustrating when this opportunity to talk with parents so often focuses on the grade (especially because they have real-time access to teachers’ gradebooks through our Infinite Campus Parent Portal).

This year Anne Smith was one teacher that decided to try something different.

Instead of concentrating on my students' progress via their grades in class, I conducted conferences with their learning as the focus. I asked my students to reflect on their learning based on the following questions:

• Assess your learning in class so far this semester. Look at your participation, growth in writing, comprehension, etc..
  
• Where, in terms of your learning, do you want to be at the end of the semester?
  
• How are you going to get there?
  
• What can I do to help?
  
• Write a message to your parents.

The students then were asked to bring home a copy of their learning assessment for their parents to read before conferences as well as place a copy in my class drop box for me to access at conferences.

It seemed to work well.

What was difficult about this whole process was that 5 minutes for conferences was definitely not long enough. I had actual conversations with parents about their child and feel like I took away more from them about how their child is growing as a learner, or how their child needs to grow as a learner. I felt like I listened as much as I talked which is a huge change from the way I participated in conferences before. I was the one relaying all my information to the parent rather than allowing them to give me insight into their child and react to what their child had written.

Click through to her post to read samples of what some students’ wrote, and also read the 47 comments (as of this writing) from both students and parents. Because Anne took it a step farther,

I am going to ask my students and hopefully their parents to comment on this process as well. Yep, that's right I want the parents to create blogger accounts as well so they can participate in the conversation. After all, that was my goal all around to create a conversation about learning.

Definitely not your parents’ parent-teacher conferences.

From talking with Anne I think this worked very well, but I agree with her that 5-7 minutes is not enough for these important conversations (it was usually more than enough to talk about grades.) I also think we should have students at these conferences, although what Anne did was the next best thing. The more we can have students, parents, and teachers involved in conversations centered around learning, not simply grades, the better.

Wikified Personal Philosophy Statements

Kristin Kakos's students are getting personal on a wiki:

One challenge that faces me each year is how to achieve cohesion between in-class activities, homework assignments, class discussions, creative projects, and essays (not to mention cohesion between units and semesters). With the guidance of the brilliant and charming Mike Porter, my students and I have discovered the glory of wikispaces.

In my American Literature classes, my students each formed a personal philosophy statement that will form the focus for the semester, and perhaps even for the year. Many of their philosophy statements explore the root of evil, the impetus for rebellion and/or obedience, the destructive force of fear, the significance of vulnerability, and other concepts that emerge from early American literature.

She links to four of her students' wikis that are partially completed, so you should visit her post and click through to the wikis. You can leave constructive comments on her post or on the discussion tabs of each wiki.

I really like this part of what Kristin writes,

I like using wikispaces because the technology doesn't get in the way; a wikispace is essentially a 21st century folder that allows for almost any type of media, emphasizes professionalism, encourages feedback, and lasts as long as you want it to, unlike a notebook that you clear out at the end of each semester. We'll keep coming back to the wikispaces throughout the semester and adding to them, and hopefully by the end of the semester they'll be able to look over their work and their ideas say, "THIS is the little piece of my soul that grew in American Literature," whether they focused on hope, goodness, evil, or any other personal topic that found its way out of a seemingly boring Puritan text.

Personal Learning Network Presentations

I’ve blogged previously about our forays into the world of Personal Learning Networks. Anne Smith blogs over on Learning and Laptops about the first presentations her ninth graders gave about their personal learning networks.

Last Friday, I had our first group of students present on their personal learning network. I used this rubric to evaluate their presentation as well as had the class access the student blog he/she was referencing to leave real time comments about the presentation (we pulled up the blog and had it appear via our overhead projectors). While the student was speaking, the class reacted to the presentation. The instantaneous feedback the students provided was valuable to the presenter. If a classmate did not feel comfortable offering oral feedback in our class debriefing, the evaluator could reference his/her blog and see what reactions the class had to the presentation.

She then goes on to provide some examples of the feedback from the students – you should check it out.

In a subsequent post, she also links to the audio of some of the students' presentations (recorded with an iPod and an XtremeMac MicroMemo). These were their first attempts at this, so please only offer constructive criticism.

Update: Jessie Comp just posted about her experiences as well.