Developing students who are global citizens, who can collaborate and create with others who are across towns, cities, countries, and oceans is an essential component of 21st century education.
The global citizens we are creating now are the leaders of our future, and they need to be able to work in a world where they can effectively team up with people of wildly varying backgrounds to produce work of varieties that we may not even be able to imagine today. These young people need to be learning how to respect each other, how to adapt current understandings to new environments, and how to maintain respectful relationships with others, regardless of differences.
Before I left the classroom, one of the strategies I had started to employ to develop these qualities in my own students was blogging. In its first iteration, it was more of an independent assignment where students commented on each others' work. My students understood the expectations of the etiquette of commenting in blogs, and they learned how to cite work in a digital environment (I specifically stayed away from traditional citation formatting like MLA or APA because I wanted to see if embedding hyperlinks as part of the text would yield a better integration of source material than I would typically see in a research project- which I did).
After having time to reflect on the blogging project and consider how to expand it from a project that developed a number of skills in my students (beyond honing writing skills) into one that also helped turn my students into the types of global citizens I described above, I would make some additions to my course.
First of all, I would have my students blogging all year long. By their senior year, students already know how to write academic essays, but they usually lack polish and style. I have definitely noticed that blogging improves those things, so it would be the primary form of writing in my class.
In addition to simply blogging as a part of the class, I would also have my students make connections with others as they research. In some units, I would require them to work collaboratively within the classroom to produce work that took a unique approach to solving one of the problems presented in the units in our class.
In other units, I would have my students reach out beyond the school to get the perspectives of other. For example, my students did a unit on juvenile justice every year. They learned about the problems surrounding sentencing juveniles as adults, and traditionally wrote an essay on it. In the final iteration of the unit in my classroom, they blogged about it. Had I continued in the classroom, this year my students would have been asked to make contact with people who work in prisons, experts on adolescent brain development (possibly in a video conference), families who have been affected by teen crime, and, if possible, talk to some of the people who had been convicted of crimes at a very young age to get their perspective on it.
While all of that research would add considerable depth to my students' understanding of the issue, I would also try to get them exposure to a global perspective. I would have them find sources in other countries (perhaps by making contact with young people in other countries through classroom blogs or other programs such as the Flat Classroom project) and find out how juvenile crime is handled there. I would have them search for articles or information about crimes in those countries and consider the perspective that the people in those countries had on crime in general, and juvenile crime in particular. Once they had a sense of perspective from another country, I would have them take that perspective into account when they produced the final project that the completed for my class, which would be a revised set of sentencing guidelines that could be taken into consideration when juveniles commit serious crimes and are facing significant sentences.
I believe that using blogging in this way, to engage students with each other and people outside of the classroom, to reach across the world to learn about others' perspectives, and to produce work that is well-researched and presents a thoughtful solution to a real, and significant, problem will help produce students who understand what it means to be respectful, ethical, thoughtful young people who are prepared to take on the challenges of a future that we are only beginning to imagine.
Before I left the classroom, one of the strategies I had started to employ to develop these qualities in my own students was blogging. In its first iteration, it was more of an independent assignment where students commented on each others' work. My students understood the expectations of the etiquette of commenting in blogs, and they learned how to cite work in a digital environment (I specifically stayed away from traditional citation formatting like MLA or APA because I wanted to see if embedding hyperlinks as part of the text would yield a better integration of source material than I would typically see in a research project- which I did).
After having time to reflect on the blogging project and consider how to expand it from a project that developed a number of skills in my students (beyond honing writing skills) into one that also helped turn my students into the types of global citizens I described above, I would make some additions to my course.
First of all, I would have my students blogging all year long. By their senior year, students already know how to write academic essays, but they usually lack polish and style. I have definitely noticed that blogging improves those things, so it would be the primary form of writing in my class.
In addition to simply blogging as a part of the class, I would also have my students make connections with others as they research. In some units, I would require them to work collaboratively within the classroom to produce work that took a unique approach to solving one of the problems presented in the units in our class.
In other units, I would have my students reach out beyond the school to get the perspectives of other. For example, my students did a unit on juvenile justice every year. They learned about the problems surrounding sentencing juveniles as adults, and traditionally wrote an essay on it. In the final iteration of the unit in my classroom, they blogged about it. Had I continued in the classroom, this year my students would have been asked to make contact with people who work in prisons, experts on adolescent brain development (possibly in a video conference), families who have been affected by teen crime, and, if possible, talk to some of the people who had been convicted of crimes at a very young age to get their perspective on it.
While all of that research would add considerable depth to my students' understanding of the issue, I would also try to get them exposure to a global perspective. I would have them find sources in other countries (perhaps by making contact with young people in other countries through classroom blogs or other programs such as the Flat Classroom project) and find out how juvenile crime is handled there. I would have them search for articles or information about crimes in those countries and consider the perspective that the people in those countries had on crime in general, and juvenile crime in particular. Once they had a sense of perspective from another country, I would have them take that perspective into account when they produced the final project that the completed for my class, which would be a revised set of sentencing guidelines that could be taken into consideration when juveniles commit serious crimes and are facing significant sentences.
I believe that using blogging in this way, to engage students with each other and people outside of the classroom, to reach across the world to learn about others' perspectives, and to produce work that is well-researched and presents a thoughtful solution to a real, and significant, problem will help produce students who understand what it means to be respectful, ethical, thoughtful young people who are prepared to take on the challenges of a future that we are only beginning to imagine.
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