I have been working on designing a workshop for teachers this summer that will be using the theme of Daniel Pink’s book:
A Whole New Mind as the the themes of Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. I think these are very important themes as we must prepare our students for their future and it is not the Information Age but the Creative or Conceptual Age as Daniel Pink discusses.
Working with Mrs. Birgel and her students to create movies illustrating the different Acts and Scenes has affirmed this to me in ways that I had not seen before. The premise of the project was that students drew acts and scenes out of a jar and then went about creating Keynote presentations which were exported to QuickTime movies that were then uploaded into her DAILE Moodle course. Since I am the digital learning coordinator, I got them started and helped along the way as students came up with creative ideas on how best to instruct their classmates. We did expect that there would be text, graphics, audio to illustrate and audio to narrate. All four classes are able to view and watch the movies within the DAILE Moodle course. Of course many students took it upon themselves to create projects that met the bare minimum while others decided writing a song, creating a Flash animation, shooting a video, or creating a theme song for their project. I loved watching the students collaborate and come up with creative solutions while at the same time, teaching their classmates about Romeo and Juliet.
Due to space concerns, I am uploading only Mariah’s song and a Facebook Movie as they are great examples of this “new mind”. Student’s response has been that they would like to record this song with her. Now that is learning in the 21st Century.
Mariah’s Song
Romeo and Juliet – The song
Carlton’s Facebook
Romeo and Juliet – Facebooked!
Two other students also did Facebook style presentations which is interesting since we “block” it at our school. Wonder what would happen if we had our students use it for their learning.
There are other great examples where students took leaps of learning and really created a solid body of work. Next year, Mrs. Birgel can use the best ones to help her students learn Romeo and Juliet. Nice when students help to make content for their classes. What will next years student create? Why resources for other units, of course.
