December- A Month of Celebrations on the History Channel

It’s December - Officially in Saipan -(well we do get to preview it while the rest of the world is still sleeping)

It’s a month of multicultural festivities and living in Micronesia with an extremely diverse population, we celebrate quite a few cultural affairs. From the Native Chamorro and Carolinians, from Thailand to Japan, from Mainland China to the Philippine Islands, from Korea to Bangladesh, we are diverse and participate in celebrating the customs and traditions of those who live here.

To celebrate a month of multicultural holidays the History Channel has developed programs to provide great teaching opportunities about many celebrations of our multicultural world. Now your students can learn about world traditions and the History of Christmas, as well as learn more about Kwansaa, St Lucia, Hanukkah and the Legend of St Nicolas.

Education World has a great resource page for teachers filled with links to lesson planning ideas about these multicultural traditions and celebrations. This resource should ease your prep planning period.

Education and learning socially about others' cultural traditions fosters understanding and respect, so join your students, you’ll enjoy the month of celebrations with them.

Wikis - A Collaborative Idea

Helping students learn to work collaboratively is a real-life task. In the real world of work people work together to problem solve, find solutions and communicate with each other. Real-life authentic tasks are key to student learning, but sometimes educators forget to look outside the textbook for ways to engage students in authentic tasks in the classroom.

Using a Wiki provides one method for creating an authentic, real life task.

An easy idea to get your students started using this collaborative tool is to let them self sort into project work groups and set up independent group meeting times using a wiki tool. A wiki page allows students to create, add and edit information themselves, making them responsible for the collaborative learning activities from the very beginning. And since a wiki page is online students can access it to edit the wiki activity from any computer.

We have used wikis very successfully this year with our School of Education students to let them decide what small groups they will work in, when they will meet to collaborate, and what topics they choose to work on.

We have also used a wiki page for Criminal Justice students to create a glossary of important vocabulary words and terms that they will need to know for the final exam. Each week students contributed new words to the page complete with definition. Now in the culminating week of the semester students can actually print out the completed wiki glossary as a study guide for the final exam.

And wikis make a great collaborative tool for faculty and staff planning too. I frequently use a wiki with faculty members to find time to meet, when everyone keeps saying their calendars are full.

Some web-based, free Wiki tools to check out:

• TWiki
• pbwiki
• Wikispaces for Educators
  

Moodle has its own wiki tool.

And once you’re sold on wiki's collaborative power, dive in :

• TiddlyWiki
• MoinMoin Wiki Engine

Public Speaking & Podcasts

Blogs and Podcasts have so many uses in the curriculum, ideas just keep popping up.

Here’s a technology idea to use with your Speech Classes:

Make use of blogs and podcasts for your students to upload their speeches for their classmates to listen to and make comments and suggestions to improve their public speaking techniques. Students are more willing to comment on their classmates’ speeches if it's not face-to-face.

This method of delivery allows everyone to listen, review and reflect over their classmates speeches post-class time. It also provides the opportunity for the speaker to hear themselves speak and to reflect over what they can do to improve.

Blogs and Podcasts are great reflective learning tools to use with your media savvy students. Remember students are much more tech savvy than we are; media is second nature to them.

Freewebs- A Virtual Library Collection Project Idea

Are you teaching seniors graduating this year?

Do you think these students will pack boxes of books to bring their new dorm or apartment to begin their college career? Don’t think so.

Here’s an assignment you can begin now to help them make a collection of all the resources they will need to begin college classes prepared. Have them create a 'Virtual Library' loaded with resources they will need when they begin their lives as college students next fall.

Use Freewebs, a great site for students to create their own Virtual Library Collection website:

• Begin by having them layout the web page in subject areas or career areas.
• Then have the students begin linking to online resources such as dictionary and thesaurus links, the periodic table, foreign language sites, English sites for writing research papers, maps for geography courses, and continue collecting all the digital resources they will need to succeed in their courses.

So when your seniors get to college next fall all they have to do is refer back to their Virtual Library Collection with all the links they accumulated this year on one site that will be easy for them to access from anywhere, anytime.

The Virtual Library Collection is a great graduation gift for your students that will give them digital resources they can refer back to over time to succeed in their college career.