Apr 11 2008
Assignment 4: Classroom 2.0
As I watched Clarence Fisher in his talk about Classroom 2.0, I did have an “aha” moment when he talked about classrooms as a studio. This has sort of been the case in my Physical Science classroom for the past couple weeks as we worked on our Astronomy unit. This is not a major unit in the course, but we do want kids to get as much as possible from it. Students presented their research to us, and wow, was there a lot of variety and creativity in the presentations! This video shows some of that.
Download Video: Posted by CWoot at TeacherTube.com.
But the connection to the assignment for me was to really push myself in Biology to get us to this type of environment. Right now we have students to a disease project–it’s detailed and really a traditional research paper. While, those are important (Clarence talks of shifting our entire view of classrooms–some places I think some resembling of a traditional classroom is okay), I do think that we can move toward what he describes. How can we prepare them to have the skills they will need in their world? Not our old world.
How can I connect this to my everyday work? I think I’m doing this a lot already. I really don’t see the classroom as a place for students to come learn from me. I don’t think the way we have our Biology class set up, that we construct ways for students to be the experts and “prosumers” of information very often, but I’d love to improve that. To me a prosumer would be someone who can interact with the content for a purpose. Sometimes, we are just providing the content. But, everyday I do think about changing attitudes toward education and reshaping my thinking of what my classroom should look like. I am improving this slowly.
