Dean Groom (Teaching and Learning Design) shares an exciting two week descriptive writing project idea (here’s a video intro he did) that mixes in writing, Moodle, digital storytelling. Here is what he’s looking at:

• it is a digital storytelling set up.
• It uses reflective writing as formative assessment
• final product and presentation as a summative assessment.

I found the following observations to be fascinating:

1. Collaborative Web2.0 projects have greater impact if they are broken down into fast and furious hands on activities – followed by more sedate reflection. There has to be a degree of pressure and urgency in the task to push the students in the task – but well resourced so that the distance between a thoughts and a ‘win’ is not too far and reinforced through reflection via Google Docs.
2. Moodle is used to form the groups. Here’s how we do that – We open the themes for online enrolment. First in bessed dressed is the way we do it. Kids opt into 1 chosen theme on that basis. They do not know who the ‘teacher’ is who is mentoring the group online. This stops kids trying to get with their mates or hooking into the ‘best worker’ groups – as they fill up fast – and kids soon learn that if they want their pick, then they’d better get on, else that group gets filled out.
3. Its important to note that the kids in their Google Group – may not actually be in their class. This means that the kids they teach face to face may or may not include those they teach online. This ensure’s teacher buy in and also is a stragic way of norming Google Docs in professional development.

4. I like everything to have a real world aspect in learning. We’ll invite an external ‘friend’ to read the books and to select a ‘winner’. Each student will then get a copy of the book using Blurb as a hard copy. Each book is then evaluated and feedback given to students.

   This gives them incentive – the chance to have a quality portfolio piece – A professionally produced book, with cool illustrations containing 8000 words on average.

5. I think that giving students not only the opportunity to write a book at the age of 14/15 – but also to sell that book to everyone and anyone is poweful.

The whole post is definitely worth reading but I enjoyed these particular points. That this whole post reads like fiction only highlights the necessity of more of us embracing these kinds of approaches in our schools.

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