off we go...
As I take on the challenge of creating a "paperless" classroom throughout this school year and into 05-06, I thought I would try and create a blog that explains my thoughts and processes of getting a class online and interactive. Expect none of this to be mind-blowing, but if you're curious to see how a mildly-computer/web literate teacher takes on this task than feel free to read along, and please offer me any advice throughout the process.

Currently I'm teaching Technology classes (think a cross between shop class and a computer lab) at Charlottesville High School, but in all likelihood I will be returning to the Social Science department next year. I've spent the last few months fiddling with blogs. I've created one to use with our Technology classes this year, but it isn't a true "blog" but really just a simple webpage as a place for links, assignments, and course information. It has served it's purpose, but I want to do more next year, both in and out of the classroom.

I've been turned on to Bloglines by Will Richardson (go check out his excellent site: www.weblogg-ed.com, right now) and his post today about the amount of student work that is basically wasted in a school year sparked me to go create this right away:

At my school, our quarter ends this week, and I know what that means. New
classes, new books, new content for teachers to disseminate, old content for
students to throw away. I'm going to make some assumptions, but if our 3,000
or so students each create just 2 pieces of content each day, that's
1,080,000 pieces over the course of the year. I'm going to be generous and
say that via the hallways, the Website, and various other outlets, a typical
student or teacher at my school may run across 250 of those artifacts in a
year in any "published" form. That's somewhere around .0002 of what our
students produced. (If that's wrong, remember, I'm an English teacher by
trade...you get my point.) Even if we assume only five percent of the total
content our students produce is really quality stuff, worthy of being added
to the knowledge base, that's 54,000 nuggets of information, 53,750 of which
I'll never have the chance of seeing.

And these numbers are only dealing with the number of "publishable content" for each student ---which he estimated as one per every two weeks. This doesn't take even begin to consider the countless smaller assignments which become fodder for bottom of the locker. What if not just the "publishable content", but the smaller steps that lead up to it could also be stored online and be accessable to all. I'm not saying that every worksheet should be online (god, how I hate worksheets and the fact that students are so conditioned to fill out packets by the time they reach high school.....but, I digress), but wouldn't it be interesting and relevant for students to post their reflections, thoughts, and ideas along the way as the encounter new material.

Thinking about how many millions of pages of notes, worksheets, and papers that I've encountered in my life as a student and as a teacher is a bit dizzying. Hopefully the end result of this next year will be a greater emphasis on creating knowledge, interacting with the content, interacting with each other, and in the end less paper. We'll see.

- posted by mrdaly @ 3:35 PM