Mr DK’s Blog

Sharon is co-founder and president of the Galileo Educational Network. www.iostudent.com/2353
She spoke about a Canadian example of deep, enduring learning.  In essence it was a tale of a teacher who has worked with an expert mentor to develop a unit of work of a sufficient standard to be entered in a national film festival.
The teacher began with digital story-telling. The importance of scripting, scaffolding, skill development, grounding in real-world meaning, and authenticity was emphasized.
Rubrics were based on high-quality exemplars. These were collaboratively created – students co-wrote top and bottom levels, the teacher wrote the middle levels. Interestingly, the students chose ‘pathetic’ as the name for the bottom level!  Reasons for word selection were well justified.
•       audience has a reason to care (one of the rubric indicators)
Self-reflection (daily), whole-class feedback (occassional), peer feedback (daily), external, parent & teacher feedback were all part of the unit. With this sort of feedback, huge gains were made in student advancement.
The teacher found that the students needed skills in how to work as an effective team (group).  Sporting examples were used to highlight the needed team-work skills.
Positive spin-offs: Student-to-student relationships were strengthened.
One of the movies went on to win the film festival.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 7:08 pm and is filed under uLearn09. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.