Finding Authentic Audiences

The best education prof I had in grad school was Dr. Fred Goodman. Once he told us once that if classrooms were open to public audiences, that we'd see teachers with clipboards, stop watches, and whistles; just like football coaches. I could completely relate. I thought how conscious I was of using every second of practice time as a basketball coach and how casually some teachers treated the first two or three weeks of school with "easing students in." We've all had teachers who spent large portions of class time telling us about how they spent the weekend or what they watched on television. Would they do this if the class had to perform under the lights on Friday, night? Probably not.

I think public performance should have a prominent place in best teaching practices. As I've noted in Why Blog?, expressing my opinions in a public forum serves to refine my thinking and even hold my feet to the fire of innovation. I've certainly found in teaching an AP course, that knowing the students' scores will be a matter of public record, has a way of focusing one's mind as a teacher. Last spring, I started to set up online exhibition spaces for some of my students' best work and submit these links to our school's online community newsletter. I joined the "Authentic Audiences" challenge based learning group at the ADE Summer Institute, last July, inspiring the title of this post and allowing me to get others' ideas about this topic. I'm absolutely convinced that schools should be aggressively seeking audiences for students.

But what to do in the mean time? Well, I've decided to drop it in the students' laps. My AP Government challenge based learning project requires them to identify an audience and to create an "authentic medium" for reaching it. Cop out or break through? I'll know in a couple of months and get back to you, then!

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Flickr Creative Commons Photo of the Big House in Ann Arbor by jeffwilcox

Paging All Waivers!

This year I was prepared.

But last time around I introduced WikiSpaces and Google Docs to my students mid-term. My adventures were not without setbacks (see Larry's Adventures in Wikiland), but some of the groups and individuals produced remarkable podcasts, videos, web sites and wikis. So then I decided that I wanted to share, blog about, or just show off their work. Consequently, I was generating ad hoc notifications and permission slips throughout the year.

This summer I whipped up three notification / waivers for my three courses. Check out the one I prepared for American Government (Click for pdf).

The document was made with iWork '09. I used a brochure template and found the banner with a public domain search. The Pages application allowed me to easily match the colors of the banner throughout the document. I thought the coolest feature was my ability to drop the public domain photo of the capitol dome into the background of the document. (A one minute Atomic Learning tutorial taught me this trick). Even a clod like me could produce a slick looking document and publish it as a pdf.

My students' first assignment of the semester was to download this document, get it signed and return it to class.

100% of them have done so, and only one parent declined any of the permissions. Pretty cool.

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Photo is a screen capture of Lit into Film course waiver.