Working with students in high school
I have to say it again, I have the most amazing job. As a teacher of students in high school in Norway, I get to spend the day with amazing, creative, fun and loveable teenagers. And with all the technology we have available it is hard not to enjoy the time you spend in the classroom. Recently I have been reading Building School 2.0: How to Create the Schools We Need, by Chris Lehman@chrislehmann and Zac Chase @MrChase . I have visited Chris’s school and heard him speak at various conferences. Reading his book gave me a better insight into the work he has done at SLA, Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. If you haven’t been there I suggest you pay the school a visit. The book is divided into 95 headlines all followed by a “From Theory to Practice” part where you get 2 or more bullet points for discussion. A must for school leaders! Here I will concentrate on what I think is the most important point that should be made concerning the use of technology in class.
Anything short of a vision of educational technology use that allows students and teachers to inquire more deeply, research more broadly, connect more intensely, share more widely, and create more powerfully, sells short the power of these tools—and more important, sells short the promise of learning and of school for our students.
If your technology use in your classroom is for Powerpoint presentations and taking notes, you haven’t really understood the potential. If you as a teacher think you need to know it all before letting your students loose, you need to reconsider. My students have been using the internet, their blogs and Skype to research, connect and share. This week we used the school’s camera equipment to create and here is the result from one of the groups with comments from students below. I am a very proud teacher and I think this is something we could work on during our Liberating Genius in the Classroom project. @Choose2Matter
We found a lot of fun costumes to use to the different scenes and we dressed the actors in a lot of funny clothes. We also used good lightning to make the film better to watch. Everyone was actually so exited when we made the film so we forgot to eat lunch for a while! – Everyone in our class has today tried the job as a moviemaker! It was a very interesting and fun project and we learnt a lot about using cameras, lights and other film equipment. We were a group consisting of five boys and 8 girls. It took us three hours, and we worked hard, structured and effective for many hours. We were all tired and hungry at the last scene, but when we saw the end result, the effort was all worth it. – First we assigned a role to everyone in the group. For example I was selected as producer. Helene and I made sure everyone did their job, and helped the others that needed help. Other tasks were: camera crew, writers, editors, directors and actors. We finished the script and started filming. We used green screen and pretended we played Kahoot around the globe. I think the movie turned out great J. If you get curious and want to watch it yourself, please click the link below. We divided the different roles, directors, editors, props and costumes, script writers and film crew. Mathias and me became editors and worked with editing the movie, during the casting. – I joined the Kahoot group, and because of my amazing acting skills, I was quickly chosen to act in our video. – To begin with, our class got divided into two different groups. My group consisted of 13 people. Therefor we decided to allocate into smaller groups to get the work done. There were about two people in each group, and the groups was for instance, filming crew, sound and light, actors etc. Ingrid and I had the responsibility for costumes and props for the actors. We found it hard to get our job done at the start, but after talking to some adults we got the opportunity to borrow some costumes from the media and communications department. – We ended up having a very nice day together. Kahoot! is a fun, educational and new way of learning, you will understand more of this by watching our video. I am sure you will enjoy it!
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