Friday some of Garth's students introduced the Renaissance and Reformation to my students via Skype.  Garth's students created two short PowerPoint on Google Docs and walked my students through the "big picture" of these two moments in history.  I was able to project the students' PowerPoint while projecting their images via Skype.  All students enjoyed the experience AND they had the unique opportunity to teach each other, instead of listening to me.  I digitally recorded the Skype session using a program called iShowU, and showed it to the rest of my classes throughout the day.  

In a week, week and-a-half, my students will Skype back to Garth's students and discuss what they learned about specific parts of the Renaissance and Reformation.  Students will work in small groups and explore unique topics; such as art & architecture, science & technology and early Protestant religions.  Garth and I want to get to the point where we can let our students chat once week.

The biggest obstacle in all of this, our bell schedules do not line up.  In the long run it will work out, because we figure students will only need ten or fifteen minutes to summarize things we have done in class throughout the week.  My superintendent and communications director both came down to watch the Skype session and offer their full support of my technology endeavors.  It was great, as a classroom teacher, to see my district leadership take a strong proactive role in something I am doing.  The students are very excited by this new method of teaching/learning and were "glued" to the screen as Garth's students students presented what they knew.

The next step is to find other teachers and students that want to interact via Skype.  The possibilities are endless.  My students can teach lessons to younger students, high school students can go more in depth on subjects I do not have time to cover, college professors and museum curators can show my students artifacts or talk from dig sites all over the world.  These are the voyages of a 21st century teacher, "to boldly go where no classroom has gone before!"

-Mike

This week, I used Skype and Google Docs to pull off a very exciting lesson.  Jacob Francis, a student from Cleveland State University, who is observing in my classroom wrote a lengthy journal on the experience.  I thought his observations and comments would be an outsiders perspective on this set of lessons.    His introduction is below:    
       In an era of rapidly expanding technological interconnectedness, it is only logical that the use of technology and communication should be integrated into the educational experience. Beachwood Middle School has fully embraced this philosophy by fully integrating technology into everyday classroom use. This past week in Mr. Holman’s class, I have had the opportunity to witness a variety of uses of technology, all harnessed to provide students with experiences that are not just technology rich, but are also interactive and collaborative. Through these experiences, students were able to learn from an expert in Renaissance art, collaborate on group projects, and for some, develop an interactive lesson that will eventually be taught to students at another school. All of these experiences were the culmination of several weeks of lessons about the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation This week began with the students learning about Renaissance art from David Church, an art professor in Syracuse, NY. The students were taught by Mr. Church through Skype, a free Internet video conferencing program. During the Skype videoconference, the students followed along with a PowerPoint containing Renaissance art images, as well as provided feedback and questions to Mr. Church regarding the presentation through a Google Document. Through the combination of Skype and Google Documents, students can learn, ask questions, provide feedback, and receive responses to their questions in real time. This was not only an excellent way for these students to learn about Renaissance Art, but it was a way that everyone involved found enjoyable and highly informative. Additionally, the use of free programs (Skype and Google Documents) allowed for collaborative instruction with an expert who was hundreds of miles away at a bare minimum of expense.

The teleconference with Mr. Church was just the beginning of 2 different types of culminating projects that would be completed by students over the course of this week. The majority of Mr. Holman’s classes would be working on group projects involving finding images of Renaissance art, and then building a podcast or movie that would be sent to Mr. Church to show them what they had learned. In a more ambitious project, Mr. Holman’s 3rd period class (which consists of only 6 students) is collaborating on a presentation covering both the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, which will eventually be presented via videoconference over Skype to the entire 7th grade class at Chardon Middle School. I will discuss these projects and my impressions in further detail below. While my explanation may be a bit longwinded, I do not feel that it does these experiences justice to simply gloss over them in a succinct manner.   Read more from the PDF below. 

I will comment more on this lesson at a later date.