Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Collaboration

Last July I attended the ISTE Conference in New Orleans. It was a pretty good conference and one of the most interesting sessions was presented by David Warlick. Even though it was the last session of the conference, it provoked a lot of thinking and confirmed ideas that I already had in my head. After investingating a little further, I noticed that he has published two book: Raw Materials for the Mind and Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century. Since then, I purchased the two books (along with so much else that is waiting to be read and digested!) and have started reading Raw Materials...

Some of the material might be a little dated, but the basic principals ring true. In the section on collaboration there is a really neat project that he describes called the Eco-Marketing Project. I looked for it on the web, but the link is broken. It is obviously designed for project-based learning and asks kids to design, develop, market and sell a product that they think other students would buy. They need to write a persuasive ‘essay’ to convince others that their product is the one that should be purchased. I thought this would be a really neat idea to do with an English class. Their project also had students posting their projects on the Internet along with their descriptions. Other students visited the site and voted for the projects they would spend their fake $200 on. I need to check into what our capabilities are in terms of technology to devise a project like this, but it would be really neat to do this. The project also has multidisciplinary aspects to it also: they need to actually make a prototype of the product and learn about the marketing side, including math. Depending on the kind of project, subjects like science could easily be included.

I am looking forward to finishing this book and digging into the second, shorter work of David’s. 

Posted by Randy on 01/05 at 01:10 PM
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