GeoBlog

The achievement gap has been an issue in the United States for some time.  By many measures, white students fare better in school than African American  and Latino students.  The National Governors Association web site states that, “’Indeed, 17 year-old African American and Latino students have skills in English, mathematics and science similar to those of 13-year-old white students.’”  These students have higher high school dropout rates, lower participation in gifted programs, lower rates of attending college, and for those who do begin college, lower rates of completing a degree.  Even when socio-economic status is factored out of the equation, children of color achieve at a lower rate than their white counterparts.
Though many intelligent people have done research which has been publicized in the mass media, states have focused time and attention on the issue, and No Child Left Behind demands that every subcategory of student must achieve for a school to be successful, the achievement gap persists.
Currently, minorities make up about one-third of the United States population, but some predict they will make up the majority of United States citizens by 2042.  Those people who don’t think this is a pressing issue or who try to deny it will be forced to confront it when it affects the majority of our children and the imminent future and well being of our country.
My school district has worked with Ron Ferguson and his Tripod Project and Glen Singleton and his Pacific Educational Group for years, but our students of color continue to score lower on standardized tests, take fewer high level courses, get referred to our alternative schools at higher rates, drop out of school at higher rates, and get suspended at higher rates than their white counterparts.  What are your schools doing to address this issue and what strategies have you found to be successful in helping all students achieve?

Flickr has many applications in a geography classroom.  I could take students on virtual field trips by creating slideshows of pictures from places we are studying.  I could ask students to create the virtual field trips.  I could use a picture as a discussion prompt.  We’re about to study Darfur.  I could find a picture of a burned village and ask students to comment on it.  I could also ask students to take pictures to represent topics we are studying, have them upload them to Flickr, and then have them sent to my website.  I’d definitely like to try using the Geoblogger feature of Flickr in my classroom.

I just used this picture on my Enough Club! blog to show how the $5000 we are trying to raise will be spent in Sierra Leone.

Image Citation:  Dominik Bartenstei. (2008, January 16).  Flickr.  Dominik Bartenstei N’s Photostream.  Retrieved October 23, 2008, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/bartenstein/2198137158/.

“The True Cost of Coffee” is part of the Volunteer Voices series created by the Peace Corp.  I would use this podcast in my classroom for several reasons.  It is a firsthand account of a woman’s work in Honduras.  It touches on a great number of the issues we discuss in class throughout the year.  Some of the issues in this less than ten minute podcast are deforestation, clean water, pollution, coffee farmers, short v. long-term goals, government help/intervention, roles of men v. women, economics, poverty, and survival.  This would be an effective way to introduce students to the idea that issues are complex and without easy solutions.  I could see using this one podcast as a starting point for a class wiki.  Small groups of students could further explore one of the issues mentioned and create a wiki page about it.  At the end of the podcast, there is an invitation to request a match between a classroom and a volunteer working in any region of the world.  This seems like another incredible opportunity to get personal, current account of life in a place we are studying.

What did you learn from the group wiki project?
Aside from Wikipedia, I had never used wikis before our class project.  Thus, I’ve learned everything I know about wikis to this point from the group wiki project.  I think it is an efficient way for a group to work because everyone can work on it when time permits.  I also think that more people working on a project results in a better end result.  It’s helpful when people can offer different perspectives and visions.  I enjoyed finding new work added when I returned to the site.  (I loved being able to go to Google Reader to see what was being done on our project and everyone else’s project.)  Another appealing aspect is that we were able to collaborate on all parts of the wiki.  Unlike traditional group projects in which people divide the work and do just their part, in our wiki, we could divide the work, but then alter what our partners did.  I like the fact that everyone has the ability to work on all parts of the assignment.

Are you encountering resistance to using wikis in your class, either from others or from yourself? If so, how do you plan to respond?
At first, I wanted to immediately incorporate wikis into my teaching.  However, I then began questioning what would happen if one person did all the work.  On the other hand, that is something that can happen with any group project.  Then I learned about the history page.  This is one of my favorite features of wikis.  This is far superior to a traditional group project because I can see who made changes, when they were made, and what they were.  The one tricky part is that everyone needs to have their own way of accessing the site.  It won’t work if they all sign in under my name.
Now, I’m wondering how to get everyone access.  Should everyone sign up with their own e-mail?  Almost all, but not all, of my student have an e-mail address.  Would their parents approve?  I think I read somewhere on the site that I could send a class list, and the company would assign passwords to each of my students.  I need to find time to try to find that information.
I’m also wondering how much help to give my students.  A blank page might be too intimidating.  I think they might need some scaffolding.  Maybe I could start with headings and/or subheading for them.  Access to the computer lab or computer cart is another obstacle.  I’ll have to see when they are available.  Also, spending time teaching students how to create wikis is another issue.  There’s such limited time in class.  The time they would spend outside of class working on wikis would likely compensate for the class time, I would think.  Plus, if we did more than one wiki project, then the time invested early on would certainly pay off.  I think the collaborative aspect of wikis would greatly appeal to my students.

My plan is to learn more about how this tool can improve my teaching.  When I’m more comfortable with it and have learned its many benefits, I plan to share it with the other middle school teachers in my school and district.  Though it seems we meet regularly for staff meetings, workshops, and training, we never feel like we have enough time to share our practices with each other.  Social bookmarking is a way for us to share our efforts and our great website finds.  Many teachers I know feel overwhelmed by increased curriculum demands, increased testing pressure, and decreased time and support.  Technology is often not on their radar, especially for older teachers.  I’d like to be able to share this easy, effective tool with them that will save time for all of us and increase support.  After the few minutes it takes to create a del.icio.us account, we’ll be able to lighten each other’s load (and improve education for our students) even when we don’t have the time to sit down together and talk.

This is a link to Enough!flakes.  I created it for the club I lead after school called the Enough! Club which is affiliated with Free the Children and Project Healthy Schools.  The goals of our group include raising awareness, volunteering, and fundraising as well as eating healthy foods and exercising.  This year, we are focusing on raising money and awareness about the genocide in Darfur, providing clean water and alternative income for the place in Sierra Leone for which we raised enough money to build a school last year, and helping sell Just Coffee, a Mexican cooperative which several of our members visited this past summer.  In addition, we will volunteer our time at places like Food Gatherers in our our local community.

For my on-line class, I needed to look at my classmates’ blogs.  My first instinct was to find my teacher’s post with all of their blog addresses in the “Facilitator’s Forum” part of Blackboard.  I went there and discovered that only one was hyperlinked.  It seemed like too much trouble to cut and paste all of the addresses every time I would need them, especially since it seems like I’ll need them a lot.  Then I remembered Google Reader.  Hurray!  All of their addresses in one place and just a click away.  My first practical, real-life use of RSS.  I can certainly see how RSS would similarly be helpful to me if I ask all of my students to create their own blogs.

After I finish this class, I hope to continue using RSS to keep me informed about issues of concern to me.  I’m already getting news feeds, and I just created custom feeds about topics I’ve been interested in for years.  I’m excited about news coming to me.  I’m unsure how it will be significantly better than my just doing a Google search when I’m interested in something, but I’m open to the possibilities of what those better things might be.  My students will benefit in two ways.  First, when I know more about the topics I teach and about better ways teach those topics, my students tend to learn more.  Second, when I know how to do something of value (such as go to one place to get a lot of information from a lot of sources), I share it with my students.

Here is my comment.

Whenever I’m learning something new, I like it when I find opportunities to go directly to the source.  On this blog, students, our consumers, write about teaching and learning using Web 2.0.  However, as one student insisted, they are different from past generations because they are not consumers.  They are a generation of producers, and they expect to produce in their classrooms as well as in their daily lives.
What impressed me about this project is that the students’ ideas are quite well thought out and insightful.  Not all posts are accepted, so it’s clear that the selection process is thorough and thoughtful.  The blog I was thinking of creating for classroom use would have been different as I had planned to design one in which all students’ work would be accepted, but I like the idea of having a blog for which students’ work had to reach a certain level before being published.

     I teach seventh grade geography, and I lead a student social action group called the Enough! Club.  I would like to use technology creatively, efficiently, and effectively.  My goal for myself and my students is for my participation in Building On-line Collaborative Environments to give me practical, immediately-usable ideas and tools to help me incorporate technology into my classroom practice in meaningful ways which can be used by all students.  I would like to better understand the power of Web 2.0 technologies, so I can share them with my students.  I would like to use Web 2.0 technologies to engage students who might not otherwise become engaged.  I would like to work to close the achievement gap through the relevancy of the WWW, the empowerment it gives students, and the motivation it inspires.  I would like to raise awareness of issues of importance to me through the accessibility and collaborative nature of Web 2.0 technologies.