Models of Teaching (with Technology): Day 2

Debriefing the Wiki Challenge

Is the word processor dead? Why or why not?
Did you turn up any tools that were new/surprising/unexpected? How so?
Did you discover any ways of writing that you had not anticipated? What were they?
Did you see examples of other teachers using these tools? Were they pedagogically sound?

Focus on your learning objectives.
Plan for process. Wiggins’ backwards design is often very helpful.
Choose your tools — and make no assumptions about experience, ability! Remember that with the addition of new processes, tools and skills, you should anticipate differentiating your instruction in new dimensions.
Consider the four lenses (or your own local variant: use some checklist, structure or protocol to evaluate your plan).

Webquests utilize guided inquiry, jigsaw learning model.
Experience a webquest about webquests.
Designed (and promoted) by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University.
QuestGarden is an archive of re-usable webquests. (For a modest fee, you can use their tools to create webquests of your own).
A webquest is an idea. You don’t need a fancy tool to build one — you can build it in a wiki, or a blog, or Google Doc, or…

Blogs tend to shine in this category: a prompt followed by discussion and responses.
Elu V’Elu is a Jewish studies blog (Rabbi Neal Scheindlin, Milken Community High School). Note how process changes with experience: here’s the previous year’s blog.
There is a norm in the “blogosphere” of citing sources by linking directly to them — a useful tool for teaching academic references.
You can build your own blogs (for free!) on WordPress.com and Blogger.com.
A sample blogging rubric — build your own, specific to your learning objectives.
Digress.it is a WordPress blog theme for discussing text in detail.
Diigo is an interesting possibility for collaborative discussion around texts hosted on someone else’s web site. Everyone would need to have their own Diigo account. Watch their video to see how it works.

Depending on the process, wikis or Google Docs are prominent tools here.
Consider the Great Debate of 2008. (Tom Daccord, then of Nobles & Greenough School, now the principal of EdTechTeacher.org).
Or a collaborative list of web 2.0 tools for Jewish educators.
Wikis require careful structuring.
Google Docs support simultaneous edits (with a chat feature!)

COPPA restricts the information that web sites can collect about users 13 and younger — which means that many web tools refuse to allow the 13-and-under set to sign up to use them.
FERPA restricts what information you can share or publish about your students: check with your school about how it handles student and family privacy with regard to working online. It varies wildly.
By law, it is assumed that anything that anyone publishes is copyright (by them), unless explicitly stated otherwise. A great source of public domain, re-usable media and images is the Creative Commons. Copyright law, in general, should be seen as an extension of concerns about plagiarism and citation.