MEAD Presentations

I really enjoyed the presentations we went to today because I was able to meet and talk with some interesting teachers from across the world and hear about what they are doing in their classrooms. I spent most of my time talking with Darik Williams from Mark Twain Elementary School in Centennial, Colorado. He created e-portfolios with his fifth grade students using wikispaces. The students in his classroom had never heard of wiki's but from the sounds of it, they were very enthusiastic about the 8 month long project. He started it at the beginning of the school year. The introduction to the project was a week long lesson on trust and responsibility. Because working on the Internet with students can be risky at times, Darik stressed the importance of making appropriate choices with the material they chose to put up and look at. He told his students whatever they put up could potentially be seen by billions of people across the world and to always keep that in mind. He decided to focus his portfolio items on writing and math. He gave ownership to the students to choose what they wanted to include as their best work. As part of school policy, the wiki was closed from the public and was password protected. Darik explained that he introduced the project to parents through a newsletter and permission slip to allow students to post, but he actually showed them the content in April conferences. When he does it again, he thought about doing an "Into to the Technology Night" with the parents to show them what the kids are doing, how to do it themselves, an ways they can participate as well and help their children. The wiki turned out to be a great classroom community builder because the students could look at each other's work, comment, provide constructive criticism, and motivate each other to do well. Since I have begun to learn about these technologies I have been thinking about how I could incorporate them into my own classroom, and this conference was an excellent opportunity to see how other teachers are putting it into practice.