Milobo’s Musings

42.

If it were the number of students in your class, it might seem like an impossibly large number.  If it were the amount of minutes you spent per subject each day, it might seem a bit rushed.  But what if you knew that 42 is the average number of people who respond and react to a student’s work from the time they enter Kindergarten until they graduate from High School? The following video created by Barry Bachenheimer really brought the point home for me:

So, after 13 years of schooling, a student’s perception of their ability as a writer, thinker and communicator has been influenced and shaped by an audience of fewer than 4 dozen people.

Makes you think doesn’t it?

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has defined Communication and Collaboration as one of the key elements students must master to be successful in the 21st century workplace. This includes:

• Articulating thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively through speaking and writing
• Demonstrating ability to work effectively with diverse teams
• Exercising flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary compromises to accomplish a common goal
• Assuming shared responsibility for collaborative work

Most importantly, students need to be able to accomplish these goals within a global community.  It’s not enough for students to be able to work effectively with the person who sits next to them.  Now, they’ve got to be able to work well with the person who sits around the globe from them.

We’re giving students the tools to take their learning out into the world through the CHS 1:1 laptop program.  Now we’ve got to take those tools and help students learn to use them to collaborate within our school community and within the global community.  How? How about starting small within your classroom and then going global when you’ve got the hang of it:

• Start Small: Create a classroom gallery of work that can be rated and commented on by student peers. Celeste Bell is doing this now with her students by creating a Studywiz Gallery of their “Jesus Moments” photographs.  While she’ll tell you that the students enjoyed taking the pictures before she created the gallery, she’ll also tell you that creating the gallery has motivated students to respond to and appreciate the work of their peers.
  

 
• Go Global: Create a project that is published and posted on the web. Marilyn Stefani is doing that now with her student’s Earth’s Composition Wiki and Google Map.  Marilyn paired her students across two classes and asked them to collaborate to create one page with background information on an assigned topic.  She then challenged the students to identify current environmental issues related to their topic and create a collaborative map that gives a brief overview of the issue and links to more information on their wiki. It’s been a challenge to teach the students to work asynchronously on a common goal, but the payoff has been that students are learning how their actions (or inactions) affect others while appreciating the knowledge and talents of their fellow students.



 

 

 

Do people really pay attention to these efforts?  The answer is yes, and sometimes in a big way.  Last year, Nancy Collin’s class created a wiki project on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I wrote about it in a Scholastic article along with Christine Day’s Google Doc project.  It’s still out there for others to see and on a whim, we decided to use Google Analytics to keep track of how many visitors we have there.  In the last 6 months, there have been visits from exactly 42 locations. Not 42 visitors, or 42 cities, or 42 states, but 42 different countries sent over 1600 visitors to the site. How’s that for a global audience?

So, we can close the doors to our classrooms and give our students an audience of 1, or we can find strategies to give our students a global audience.  Their future will include the challenge of living and working in a connected world.

Are we preparing them for this challenge?

I’d like to say we’re giving it a good try.