The example of Clarence's student's blog that received 23000 hits gave me hope that students will be inspired to write (on a blog) because of a real audience rather than just performing for the teacher. I have found that only the motivated students are good at writing to perform for the teacher, while others usually point out the redundancy or pointlessness of the performance: for example, "But you know we're talking about seed germination--why do I need an introductory sentence to tell you that?" I've wondered how to make writing more real and meaninful, but so many of my ideas seem contrived. The best one I had was to give each student a different assignment, so there would be a real information gap that required the students to communicate to fill that gap, but I got scared by coming up with and keeping track of all the individual assignments--a differentiation nightmare. Maybe the world audience on blogs gives the writing a legitimate purpose.
Matt McG shared a similar example of this in his Middle School Technology course. He has students create how-to videos for tasks (for example, how to make a table in Word) and post them on YouTube. (FYI, Notebook Software has Smart Recorder to capture a video of what you see on the computer screen.) His students have been able see how frequently their videos are viewed and what ratings they get by viewers. No "dead" performing for the teacher there! Good example, Mr. McGovernor.
Thanks for the credit, Martin. I'd love to say it was a Govenor orig, but can't in good faith.
ReplyDeleteThe extension of the YouTube audience idea is that it becomes its own rubric. YouTube viewers can rate the video with stars.
So not only is the teaching not "dead", neither is the grading!