The Grade 8 EXPO is the culminating project for students in the Middle School. It is a cross-curricular unit encompassing the core and exploratory subjects.
The project is based on three Enduring Understandings:
Change - Students will understand that change includes environmental, political, social, religious and economic transformations
Interdependence - Students will understand that decisions or actions can have an impact on other people or nations
Identity - Students will understand how people define themselves and their place in the world as well as how they are defined by others
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Over the last few months, the strike of the Writers Guild of America has led to a significant shift in viewership from TV to online media, as more and more people got fed up with re-runs of old series. Blogs, podcasts and video sharing sites are among the online media outlets benefitting from the TV exodus.
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Social bookmarking - ever heard of it? It’s yet another example of a powerful new way of collaborating. In the immortal words of Herry Monster, two heads are better than one. Here’s why and how…
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I was chatting with a student in Grade 6 today about a movie he made. After 10001 photos, he and his brother produced a high quality entertaining stop-motion movie simply by using Movie Maker. When asked what he had done with it, he said “YouTube.”
It made me wonder how many other students are producing great stuff that we are not even aware of.
Any ideas for organizing students’ multimedia work somehow? Many students from IB down to Grade 6 have produced great work. Many have posted randomly to YouTube. There is great digital art, models, diagrams, etc. They are crying for an audience. Not sure what is the best solution. Should the school host the products? Should there be an independent site with grade or subject categories? Should we simply gather links to outsourced hosts?
“We are failing our students when it comes to teaching them about the Internet. We either block things they will eventually get access to, at home or at an internet café, or we let them loose in the World Wide Wilderness without so much as a Swiss army knife. Wikipedia, Youtube and facebook are not the biggest problems.”
That was the blurb for my session discussing the dangers of setting students free on the Net without a little guidance. Here are some of the sites and resources that I used:
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ISM is in the middle of accreditation, and the school is committing itself to meeting a number of different external standards, the implementation of which requires careful consideration. Among these are the NETS (National Educational Technology Standards) standards, which outline the 21st century skills our students should be gaining by virtue of being in our classrooms. This has implications for all teachers at ISM.
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Welcome!
This baby is primarily intended for teachers at International School Manila, as a means of sharing our thoughts and ideas on the role we think ICT should play in education at our school. Not because we think there should necessarily be MORE technology in classrooms, but because we think the technology we do use could DO a whole lot MORE for the educational outcomes we hope to achieve in our classrooms…
The blog you’re reading is a point in case: while up until now, there has been a monthly IT newsletter going out to all faculty and staff in the school, it was in a traditional, static HTML format, which did not allow for any form of interaction, such as comments with user feedback or further discussion of a topic. The IT @ ISM newsletter is therefore being superseded by this blog, as we felt a blog could do more to promote a conversation about the role of ICT in our classrooms.
Through our posts and discussions, we hope to make the case that the vast plethora of new web 2.0 tools cropping up on a daily basis not only can, but probably will (whether we like it or not) fundamentally change the educational landscape in which we work. By embracing it early on, we probably stand a better chance of getting it right and benefiting our students and ourselves as educational professionals.
