If you aren’t reading his stuff, you need to be.

Start here…

http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/899-Connection-and-Disconnection-in-the-Digital-Age.html

Powerful stuff this morning. Thanks, Chris.

Let me articulate a bit of the goals of this new project. I should have done this yesterday, but didn’t have the time. Thank you all who commented with ideas, they are great!

Our goal is to create a blog and vodcast to help folks around the world learn Spanish. That’s a tall order, and one that’s been done before in a myriad of methods. Some of the most amazing ones are TryMango and LiveMocha.

We want to do something a bit different, with a bit of 6th grade flair. We in our class often watch short clips of the Jeff Corwin Experience (from DE Streaming) as he explores Central and South America and tries to use his limited Spanish. We then break apart what he says and correct it.

A few days ago we came up with the idea of publically trying to help him. And so, www.teachjeffspanish.com was born!

We decided on teaching Jeff because we felt like it would be so much fun for people to come and learn along with us without feeling like we were teaching “them” necessarily. This just felt like such a fun way to teach Spanish with a focus on Jeff, who seems like the type of guy who would love this kind of thing. And to answer a question in the comments, this would absolutely be appropriate for anyone, anywhere who wanted to learn Spanish or maybe brush up the Spanish learned in high school, etc.

For what it’s worth, this is an all-kid idea and I’ve just implemented what they wanted, and guided them along the way. Cool, eh?

Here is what we’re thinking…

1. A daily blog post, posted and edited by kids, with a new word of the day. We’ve already developed a category structure in which to place the words, and it looks good. There would be one post per day, one word per day. We’re working on ideas such as pronunciation, etc.

2. A weekly vodcast with student hosts (permission slip pending). This is where we’re stuck. We want something amazingly fun and quirky that will help you learn/improve your Spanish in a practical way, but without it being cheesy or corny. For as silly as it was, Guinea Pig TV was so much fun!I wish it was still around.

That’s what we want, something viral, something fun, something that will catch some notice because of the quality. I’ve got a kid who knows iMovie so I’m going to let *her* use my personal MacBook Pro to cut the video.

We just need a great idea. Can someone contact Marco Torres for me?!

Any feedback is welcome, and remember, my kids are watching this like a hawk, so talk to them!!

Ok so I’m working on a new project. Silly me, always a new project.

We’re working on a new site to teach folks Spanish. Specifically, Jeff Corwin. Trust me, I’ll announce it formally in a few weeks. My students and I have been working on this and now we need your help. We’re out of ideas!

One of my students came up to me and asked me to blog it. She asked, “can the network help”?

Can you imagine?

Anyway, here is their letter, can you help them?

We have an idea for a site. We have picked out a few 6^th graders to help. The idea is to improve Jeff Corwin’s Spanish. We are planning to make a blog and a weekly show. We already have the basic format. We really need help with the idea (purpose) of the show. The show cannot be cheesy or boring. The show must be educational and unique. Most of all, this has to be fun and exiting. Will you help us?

We’re going to do a weekly show, a vodcast, if you will. It will be short and quirky but fun. At least, that’s what we’re hoping for. We need help with ideas for a show. Got any?

Ask your kids, maybe they’ve got a good idea!

I’ve been thinking a lot about story telling. Since creating the Life Round Here project I’ve been wondering how the end results would turn out. As it turns out, as kids were going through the process of writing and then storyboarding, they ran into some serious roadblocks. Walking down Story Road turned out to be a more arduous journey than they expected…

I’ve been also wondering why they found this project to be so darn hard. You see, the kids were so looking forward to doing this project, in part based on the hype of competing against so many other schools, and in part because it is so technological. Some of them maintained that motivation throughout the duration of the project and others seemed to lose it. Once the novelty wore off and the story was still waiting inside the heart, kids found it difficult to coerce it out. Here are my reasons why I think this project was easier for some than others:

On a side note, please remember my students are young, typically 11 and 12 years old.

1. For some kids, it’s really tough to see what’s in their heart. Be it that they are young and perhaps they have not developed the schema to look inside the heart and articulate the emotions swirling around. Maybe it is because they are subject to such an onslaught of folks telling them how they feel that they do not understand how they actually feel or whether the feeling is genuine. For some, it may be that feeling and emotions are simply too painful and are simply avoided.

2. For some, it may be that circumstances are just so difficult that they are not willing to articulate them. I respect this. Quite simply, I have learned through talking kids through this project that there are some of them dealing with very adult issues and some of them are not handling it very well. Some are forced into maturity by the sheer gravity of the circumstance. This can make a project like mine even harder, because they ride the fine line of deciding whether to tell the whole story about what life is really like, or continue to hide it, sit down and remain quiet like we like so much.

3. Some kids are so wrapped up in a search for identity and are finding it in subculture. It’s interesting to watch kids from the beginning of the year to the end and how they can tend to change. The year they spend in our school (which is an amazing school, by the way) can be a defining one that has the tendency to catapault a kid on a certain course in terms of identity. The way they dress can radically change in a matter of weeks depending on the group of friends in close proximity. I would posit this not to be unique to our school, and is possibly a universal truth. I imagine the search for identity and the finding of identity in the context of subculture doesn’t stop when they leave us, either. This unawareness of self, however, can be detrimental to a personal project such as this because we can become clouded by the thoughts and emotions of others and unaware to analyze our own hearts through a clean lens. It is possible that we become unable to determine what is true and what is good because we are so impacted by those around us and what we allow to enter our ears and eyes. We identify ourselves in the context of something desirable, and if inauthentic,  we are unable to see our true selves. If the self is hidden, any story created out of the center of the being will be nothing more than off center.

4. The technology can be frustrating. Despite the novelty effect of using this type of equipment, the kids do tend to get frustrated. Since we’ve taught them so well that any time they get frustrated they are to raise a hand and holler out our names, they do so frequently. Needless to say, this got irritating. Some kids have a seeming inability or unwillingness to work through a problem or logically consider a solution. These kids are totally teacher-dependant. It is possible that we have created this monster, but I’m unwilling to categorically state that. This is partly why I tend to disagree with radical constructivist learning and can tend to lean much more towards guided discovery. Kids need hand-holding, and that’s a natural part of the learning process. Often, they just needed me to prod them to seek first a solution themselves applying basic logic, and at times they needed a guiding word or two. More often than not, with just a smidge of help, they conquered their own problems through the process, and that makes the learning sweeter. I suppose I could have just gone over and done it for them, but…

These are just a few of my thoughts having watched kids create over one hundred stories over the past few weeks.

The winners from my school will be announced towards the end of this week, and the announcement will happen here. Stay tuned!

1. Story Rd. picture from umjanedoan’s flickr stream.

2. Heart picture from geishaboy500′s flickr stream.

Got this email today, not sure about this, I feel uneasy. What do you think?

David wrote:
Slide share – Moodle.

We are looking for advice and we are willing to pay you for it. We have a
project where Moodle is the center of focus.

David

And then a second email that said:

Chris – sorry – my bad.

By the way, the MOODLE deal is the beginning of some big projects and I feel we
need a sharp expert who knows the technology. I wouldbe asking you to help us
set the stage for MOODLE based on the certain plug ins we would need. Your
expertise would help us and you would recieve compensation !! Can we connect?

Not sure about all this. I have not looked at the web site in his email address,  pretty sure it will be blocked here at school.

What do you all think?

My classes and I spent four days last week in the computer lab working on our projects. After watching nearly one hundred stories I’ve narrowed our field down to a few to be posted to the project wiki for comptetion. I think we’ve got some good ones!

If you’re participating or just interested, Kim Cofino (who is amazing, by the way!) has penned a solid lesson plan for how to break this thing down into digestable chunks.

For what it’s worth, my kids had loads of trouble defining what American culture even is, let alone determining how it has changed in recent times. Are we in the midst of a lack of cultural identity?