And the Countdown Continues

Cited from Writing in my Hand blogpost

Digital Learning Day is coming, and ready or not I will be going to Washington D.C. to share our work. I have been working and re-working the lesson plan I want to share with teachers at this event. It is so important to get it right, to share the work of my students and our philosophy that real writing, for real purposes, makes better writers. I have been meeting with a team of teachers all week bouncing one idea off another to try to create a lesson that reflects the best of our work. We have come up with an outline I think is going to work. I have several opportunities to share our work, a lesson demonstration live at the Newseum in Washington D.C. When you check out the venue, it is topical, ever changing, and one of the coolest places I have ever seen. Check out this video about the venue, called A Day in the Life of a Museum.

I want to create a lesson that reflects our work, and the edge and feeling of this venue.  How could our work fit into the theme of Digital Learning Day?;

The challenge in making this live presentation is we have 15 to 20 minutes to present a meaningful portion of our digital world. I have decided that we will be sharing the blogs of my English Language learners. My students have each selected a topic that they are passionate about. Over the next 6 weeks they will be conducting research within their field of interest and posting their process on their individual blogs. Our blogs are always evolving, just like the media at the newseum, and from that our lesson idea was born.

Our lesson in February will be a mini- lesson on how to write academic comments vs. social comments.  We will have a special Edmodo page set up for the day of the event. Since our blog site is by invitation only, students will post selected blog posts on a Digital Learning Day Edmodo page to share with the teachers and visitors in Washington D.C.  We hope to have participants at the D.C. event log into Edmodo and respond to student work. To kick it up a notch, a sampling of our students will be sitting live in our computer lab on that same Edmodo site, having an on-line conversation with those at the event. Now this means getting my middle schoolers to be up and going at 7am to be part of our 10am group share in D.C. We are still working out the logistics but it is an exciting prospect.


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