Digital Board

Here's a link to this week's project: the digital board.

I quite enjoyed the process of creating a digital board. I can foresee myself using this process quite a bit to help students develop their respectful and ethical minds.

Although I am not in the classroom this year, I have many teachers at my site who teach the same course I taught, and they will do the same units I did. I plan to share this resource with them, so that they can use it to help their students develop their respectful and ethical minds, as well. 

This tool provides me the ability to create an exploration for students to more fully explore an issue from multiple perspectives. Although our course texts are good, this approach provides much more than printed texts ever could because it allows me to embed media an other sources for my students to explore.

In the case of the Juvenile Justice topic I chose to explore, my goal was for my students to understand the human side of the issue. I wanted them to consider the role that a child's experiences has on his or her long-term chances of ended up incarcerated; I wanted them to hear both the side of those who have committed crimes and that of their victims' families. I wanted my students to feel the issues, in addition to looking at them analytically, in order for them to develop a more complete picture of this complex topic.

I believe that by creating this process for my students, they will be building both their respectful and ethical minds. They will need to understand the perspectives of both sides, which will help them develop their respectful minds. They will be challenged by seeing youthful offenders who have gone on to become successful adults because they had the opportunity to make changes in their lives, and I believe this will be something they hadn't considered. 

My students will be developing their ethical minds by creating their own sentencing guidelines that would address some of the issues we have studied in this unit. From here, they will be getting active on forums and, if I am able to arrange it, they will talk to attorneys and ask about the feasibility of some of their suggestions. 

I want my students to realize that making changes takes time, but that they have to be willing to invest themselves in something and spend the time it takes to create a lasting change. I hope that this assignment teaches them that while this process is challenging, it is something worth doing.