Second Life Education Research

I’ve been consulting at a local high school for the past few months. My job is to help the six teachers in the department learn to integrate the new computers in their classrooms into their pedagogy. When I last posted about this work I received an excited response from others doing similar work so I thought I’d post about it again to provide some details about the progress of the project.

This week I bounced between two classrooms. I persuaded both teachers to ask students to use Impress (the OpenOffice version of PowerPoint) to present informal research papers. Two class sections prepared a plan for a white water rafting trip based on Downriver and research they gathered online. Students worked in pairs to gather information, plan the itinerary, and then design their presentation with a specific audience in mind. Next week the students will present their plans and we will pretend to be their intended audience, ask questions, and vote on whether we think they planned well enough that we’d like to take the trip. I added the element of a hypothetical audience to help the students make rhetorical decisions in their slides and it seems to have had a big impact on the amount of thought and focus they put into the work. Over and over I overheard students debating “But will the go for that? Maybe we should try to lower the price of the trip? Would that age group think that was fun?” Most of the students in these classes are juniors who are retaking Sophomore English. This level of engagement with an assignment is unusual.

In the other two sections students have been studying Transcendentalism including Thoreau and Emerson. Their assignment was to create a slide show defining conformity, nonconformity, and individualism according to the two writers and then to connect the Transcendental philosophy with a more modern work and our modern culture. Again, I stressed that their presentation style was an important part of their content. Their slide design should compliment the content of the slides. Students used nature images, soft colors, and floating quotes from Emerson and Thoreau in the early presentation slides but as they moved into the modern examples I saw them shift the style to suit the examples they chose. Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King were common choices for modern thinkers but a few thought about more reactionary figures and used Marilyn Manson or a whole culture such as Goth or Emo.

The third period of the day is the lunch period and students leave class to go to the cafeteria in shifts. The class I worked with left for lunch for the middle thirty minutes of the class period. The teacher warned me that when they come back from lunch they can be a bit “wild” and it might take a few minutes to get them back on task. She was shocked when students starting wandering back from lunch early to get back to work on their projects.

These assignments are by no means unique. Many teachers incorporate hands-on activities into their classrooms but for these classes these assignments signaled a significant shift from quiet in-class reading and vocab quizzes to excited, engaged students producing meaningful projects.

For the next two weeks I’ll be working with four freshman literature classes who have been reading Romeo and Juliet. Rather than spending their time reading the play aloud in class (which causes half the class to fall asleep), I’ve asked them to slug through it on their own time. Beginning next week, we’ll work in pairs to begin fake MySpace pages for the major characters of the play. They’ll write several blog entries from a modern-day version of the character to describe the events of the play and that character’s reactions. They’ll be asked to justify their decisions with information from the text. Would Juliet really be a “Paris Hilton” type or would she be a “Lindsay Lohan” type? How would Paris really feel if he was left at the altar? Stay tuned for the results of these projects. They should be rather interesting.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 4:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Research. 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.