Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln!
It started out like any other day, but changed drastically at 10:30 AM EST. Here's the background so you understand: We have been working with an awesome teacher from the Chicago area, Carol Broos, on a Lincoln project using VoiceThread. My kids and a class from her school partnered up to learn about Lincoln. Each pair studied a topic of their own interest and placed their research on VoiceThread. If you want to have a look at the VoiceThread that started it all, click here to see the thread.
Over the course of the past month, my class and Carol's spoke a couple of times over the Internet. The kids just thought it was the coolest thing to be able to see their counterparts half-way across the country. Putting a face to a name is a powerful thing, as us adults know.
Finally the big 200th arrives! Carol's school planned an assembly to celebrate the big day and invited us to 'sit in' via a video link. Well, that just knocked my kids' collective socks off, not to mention my principal.
We started at exactly 10:30 as part of a nationwide reading and speaking of the Gettysburg Address. This was followed by Carol's students performing Americana music and dance, video presentations, and other entertaining things. My kids loved it!
The biggest surprise for me was that not only did my principal arrive on time to watch some of this, she actually stayed for almost the whole show. Also in attendance was my friend Lee Kolbert, who helped arrange this partnership. So, thanks again, Lee! I really think that my principal really saw the power of technology for learning, especially when the learning wasn't directly tied to a high-stakes test. How do I know? Well, the last minute notification that I had to talk to the faculty at yesterday's meeting about what I did was the first clue!
Now that this one is done, it's time to move to the next project. I hope that it's as much fun as this one, and as mind-blowing for my students, myself, and my principal!
So, happy birthday, Mr. Lincoln! You'd be happy to know that even you're not around to see it, you're still creating positive changes in people that will hopefully last a lifetime.
Great job with the whole project, David. But I beg to differ that it wasn't tied to the high-stakes test. This type of activity most certainly is tied to testing. If teachers taught like this all the time and truly and deliberately tied in the standards, then students would not need to practice the test. They would be prepared for the tests because they would know the material... oh yeah! Remember those days, when we taught and the kids knew the material and then they showed what they knew? And we didn't spend 170 practicing test taking skills? I say, FEH, to anyone who doesn't get it. You get it! And I believe, despite all the pressure from above, your principal gets it too.
Congratulations on a job well done!
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