Wednesday, February 12, 2014

METC Day 1

#METC14

First day of Midwest Educational Technology Conference at St. Charles Convention Center. Lots of great ideas thrown around in the main session and the breakouts. As is the case with any conference you’ve got to sift through the muck and mire and find the nuggets you’re going to allow to shape and change you.  Here’s my attempts to put in words the best of what’s hit me today.

Things I want to try…

Passion Projects

Josh Stumpenhorst, Chris McGee, and Scott Morrison all do some version of passion projects. It’s the google premise – employees spend 80% of the work week doing assigned work and 20% of their work week working on something of their own crazy design.  

 Morrison’s been doing it at Plaza for a year now after learning about it at METC in 2013. On Friday’s kids choose something they’re passion about and go to work, researching it and learning it.  It’s unscripted, ungraded, and totally open-ended. The structure of it is that kids have to produce some sort of product and they have to reflect on it at the end of every period.

This idea is super-enticing to me. It brings together all of my best moments in education the last 3 years – directing drama at Plaza in 2012-13; facilitating student-led, student-created dances, assemblies, and projects at Congress in 2013-14; watching Cailin Morrow play her guitar in my class the last day of school after 96.5 The Buzz played her music on the radio waves in 2012.  Each of these moments involved sitting on the sidelines watching students shine about something they’re passionate about. 

Do I dare to give away Friday’s and see if we can pull off a colossal “Yes, and….”  - mastering 8th science curriculum and allowing kids to break into something they’re passionate about at school

Blogging

Lots of people talked about student blogging.  What if I had every student blogging on Blogger with their ParkHIll student ID and had their blogs populate Blogger? What if they blogged about their Passion Projects every Friday and emailed their parents a link to their blog post at the end of Friday class? (thanks Steve Sheriff for the idea)  What if I had them comment on at least one person’s passion project from a different class? What if this spilled over to the rest of their classes and they started updating those classes as well?

Digital Legacy 

Kevin Honeycutt really pushed the idea of digital legacy in a few of his sessions. Besides telling our students not to bully, not to post nude pictures, not to drop the F bomb online, what are we telling them TO DO? When I google their name will I only see links to the video games they played and the social networks they joined, or will I see things that make me want to hire them or give scholarships to them? What if we had student engage in legacy projects – projects where students have to do something good for their community or the world? Great examples at openworldcause.com


People to Follow

Here are some folks who blog/tweet that I’m now following on my PLN (and you should too!). Their blogs and websites are treasure troves of honest reflections of engaging students in the classroom and their mishaps along the way. 


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