Empowering Students to Create and Share Content: Guest Blogger Rebecca Burnett

As we embark on school-wide conversations about differentiated assessment and digital literacy and citizenship, the VLE can provide an organic, subject-specific way to put those initiatives into practice.  

In several of my upper level and AP classes, I have asked students to do research on a relevant topic.  While I used to have to devote several class periods to monotonous Power Point presentations, I now ask students to develop VLE pages as a way to share the information they have found with their classmates.  As students develop these pages, I ask them to keep their audience in mind.  How much content would a reader want?  How might the reader be visually engaged by the page?  What is the optimum way to present/deliver content?  In effect, students become web designers, but the VLE enables them to build pages without having to know how to code.  As students develop their own multimodal texts, they think about the needs of a reader; thus, they develop both multimodal literacy and empathy at the same time.  Here is a sample of a student page providing background information on Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a text students analyze in Fairy Tales:

 

Because students are so comfortable in an online setting, they can also find ways to intersperse playful touches with the academic material.  For instance, this page included a Buzzfeed quiz:

Because students developed these resources themselves, they were more invested in the research.  Their classmates consumed the pages with pleasure, digesting more information than I could ever have hoped to deliver to them in a lecture on a similar topic.  Because the pages allow for elegant and streamlined delivery of large amounts of material in a short time, they can be browsed at home or in class and still leave me with more class time than I used to have when students did research presentations.  

I also used the VLE to create a digital assignment sheet for this project.  Putting the assignment sheet in a “note” enabled me to embed a youtube tutorial right in the assignment sheet:

I have also used the VLE to teach students how to write responsible, informed online comments.  In both Drag Identities and What Women Want, after students peruse a page of content on the VLE, I ask them to “comment” on what they read.  For these comments, I find that the online discussion tool on the VLE is the most useful platform, because it allows students to start new threads of discussion, to post original responses, and to reply to their classmates’ comments, directly.

Here are a few sample comments from different threads on the “Intersectional Feminism” page:

In class, we talk explicitly about what makes a good comment and how to disagree with someone in a respectful, intelligent way, rather than devolving into the vitriol so often seen on public websites and social media.  These online posts are a particularly excellent opportunity for quieter students to make their voices heard; the longer comment above was from a student who barely spoke aloud all semester!

As you can see, the VLE has revolutionized my teaching.  At the same time, it has given me the gift of having additional time to sit with my students and talk about books.

ADVIS Tech Gold Mine Session

GA Salon: Celebrating Community, Conversation and Ideas

In the rush of school days, filled with classes, clubs, coaching, directing, planning, department and faculty meetings, teachers can be left hungry for collegial conversation about important topics ~ not necessarily related to school life.  To satisfy this desire, three years ago, GA instituted its first Germantown Academy Salon.

In the rich tradition of the 17^th and 18^th century salons, the GA Salon is an informal gathering of interested and interesting people who share a passion for ideas across a broad range of subjects.  In the past three years, teachers have gathered in the Roberts Library to discuss a variety of thought-provoking topics: the nature of change, the concept of home, the characteristics of adulthood, the role of play in our lives, the notion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and, most recently our relationship, to poetry.

Refreshments foster the social nature of the group.  A glass of wine, a provocative topic, a smart group of people: what could be better!  The salon meets four times throughout the year, and is comprised of faculty, staff, and administrators from all three divisions of the school. 

Although it is sometimes challenging given our busy schedules to make time for the salon, those who do always leave more closely connected to their colleagues and enriched by the conversation.

Delivering Broad Classroom Content: Guest Blogger Rebecca Burnett

I’m an old-school literature teacher at heart.  There are few things that make me happier than sitting around the Harkness table with my students and getting elbow-deep in a novel.  While I am not adverse to technology, when I was first tasked with integrating educational tech in my classroom, it seemed to me to be an awkward fit with my discipline.  That is why it came as such a surprise when I discovered how useful our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) can be.  

The VLE is now one of my favorite teaching tools.  It has revolutionized the way I teach, expanded the walls of my classroom, and broadened the range of techniques, types of content, and assessments at my disposal.  At the same time, it has, paradoxically, allowed me to have more of those meaty, Harkness table discussions of text; by streamlining the way I deliver other aspects of the curriculum, it has made more space for the traditional textual analysis I love.

In this post, I want to share with you a few of the ways that I leverage this tool to enhance my teaching of English.  Specifically, I’d like to share how the VLE enables me to more elegantly deliver a broader range of content, flip my classroom, and empower students to create and share content with each other.

Delivering Broader Classroom Content

I have been teaching a feminist literature and theory class called What Women Want for ten years now.  As feminism has taken center stage in many digital publications, from blogs like Jezebel, to online posts from The New York Times and The Huffington Post, students and fellow colleagues have begun to send me articles related to feminist issues in the news.  I also find that I come across articles, videos, tumblrs, and memes in my own online reading, and I frequently flag items that would be perfect complements to a unit of study in What Women Want.  In the past, I would occasionally print one of the articles to share with the class, but an article here or there did not afford my students the same experience I was getting--the mere fact of being inundated with material related to feminism in my own online life meant was I was truly aware of the immediacy of this issue.  By contrast, my students weren’t necessarily experiencing feminist issues outside the classroom, and an isolated, printed article did not change that dynamic.  Enter the VLE.

I have now developed pages of content related to different topics that complement the guiding questions of our course and nuance our understanding of the main texts.  For example, when we read The Color Purple, we focus on intersectional feminism, examining the ways in which factors such as class, race, culture, and sexual orientation shape the experience of being a woman.  In the midst of that novel, I ask students to spend a weekend browsing content on a page I’ve developed on the VLE about intersectional feminism:

Students browse the page, reading articles, watching videos, and getting a sense of the different strands of the issue.  I am able to deliver tons of content efficiently and elegantly, and the students get a sense of how relevant and widespread this issue is beyond the classroom.  

Summer Seminar at Germantown Friends School

Middle and Upper School Teachers

 

Germantown Friends School is forging a partnership with the professional development organization Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO). FHAO offers incredible seminars for teachers across a range of topics.

 

FHAO will offer the Holocaust and Human Behavior Seminar this summer at GFS. Please click here for information.

 

Whether or not you teach specifically on the Holocaust or 20th century Jewish and European history, the pedagogical models and strategies combined with the ethical grounding that FHAO offers are powerful examples of inquiry-based social studies, literary studies and social justice education which can be adapted across a range of themes in the classroom.

Understanding ADHD

The most recent Germantown Academy 1^st Thursday presentation on ADHD drew a record number of interested teachers.  The GA Counseling Department, as always, did an excellent job of framing the discussion about ADHD within the most current research, specifically the article ADHD in kids: What many parents and teachers don’t understand but need to know , and illustrating the general concepts with specific and familiar examples of GA student behavior.

Additionally, those in attendance met by division and identified specific strategies they use to address the needs of students with ADHD.  Not surprisingly, many of the techniques that help these children benefit all students.  To view a slide show of the presentation click here.
 

Unique Professional Development Opportunity: The New Community Project Workshop

Spring is the season of growth ~ for flowers, shrubs, trees, and teachers, too!

Over the last two years, as a school, we have begun to explore the Design Thinking process and its application to the curriculum.  Nowhere has that process been more successfully implemented than in the New Community Project, a course created by Chidi Asoluka, Alcott House Head, Upper School English teacher, and Director of New Comm.

On Saturday, April 9th, 2016, Germantown Academy will offer a 3-hour workshop from 10:00-1:00 in the Beard Center for Innovation during which we will explain the NewComm/design thinking process, hear from our partners this year at Urbanstead, and then work in the school gardens to do some planting.  

This event is open to all curious GA teachers and students.  Upper School students interested in enrolling in the New Comm course next year will find this workshop particularly helpful.

If you are interested in joining us for this event, please RSVP by emailing Chidi Asoluka at chidi.asoluka@germantownacademy.org by Friday, April 8. 

Got ExCamp Ideas?

Friends!

A brief interruption of your current Spring Break programming to remind you to please consider sharing some topic of educational interest with your colleagues at our very first EXCamp on Monday, May 2, 2016, 3:30-4:45 p.m.

As a reminder, there will be two 35-minute sessions, so you can facilitate one and participate in another.

Please click here for the proposal form.

And now we return you to your regularly scheduled Spring Break activities, already in progress.

See you soon!

Maggie