Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

              

It may be that the most popular purchase we made in the past year was the poster printer.  Our PhotoShop-savvy volunteers are going a little crazy organizing our teams and clubs into READ poster creations.  Here are a few of our latest team creations.  The clubs are coming.  The cast of Grease was just in to borrow biographies of James Dean and Dwight Eisenhower and On the Road.

       

Dan Meder, my favorite video production teacher, came by yesterday to ask an innocent question about posting the students’ Spirit Week documentary. When he left, we had a wild new scheme for learning and change.

After listening to a bunch of conference podcasts and working with some teachers on class podcast projects, I wondered how we might use postcasts, or webcasts, or streaming video to enhance our learning climate and meet the most pressing needs of students and teachers.

I also wondered how many students actually read the handouts I archive on the webpage and if there were a more effective strategy for presenting those issues that come up over and over again. We played a bit with student-created learning objects (relating to research) last year, but we’ve learned a lot since then.

So Dan and I brainstormed on a new unit for his talented Video Production classes. We will go through the curriculum, identifying the universal head scratchers, and making very short (and entertaining) videos to address those sticky little issues. It ought to be easy for a social studies teacher to pull up a needed language arts refresher before a written project! We will make our students responsible for learning, presenting, and sharing the knowledge and making it available 24/7. Dan loves it when his students are engaged in authentic work for real clients–when they make a contribution. Dan also loves that the students will have to learn all of this content before they produce.

We ran down the hall to capture Carol, our Language Arts Chair, and to propose that we start with what we call our writing non-negotiables. It took Carol about a minute to make some sense of our excited babbling and then we discussed prioritizing the writing issues. Passive voice and apostrophes seem immediately critical!

In preparation for the unit, Dan and I brainstormed effective video teaching strategies. We’ll share School House Rock and Standard Deviants films with the class. The creative challenge is to make ideas that some might consider the true stuff of yawns, truly compelling!

I can see us moving through math and chemistry getting teachers to appear in the webcasts on solving for x or balancing equations. I can see puppets and animations and riveting live action shots. I can see interviews with mock guest experts.

I’ll get back to you soon with student reaction and vision.

<> P.S.  Dan, one of our new math teachers, stopped in right after I saved this post and asked how we might create video instruction for students who need a little review.  I can’t wait to introduce him to the other Dan and his class!