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I'm Baack!

After taking Week 10 and Week 11 off from blogging and participation logs it is refreshing to be back. I am going to use this first post to just talk about how excited I am about my produsage project! I used my third token for an extension so it isn't quite finished yet (I took three classes this summer and completed my internship) so as the end of the semester rapidly approached I found myself buried under work. 

I cannot wait to share the project with you when I finish later today but I decided to build a project that I will actually use in my Sociology classroom this fall, assuming we are doing distance learning. If we are back in the classroom I can easily adapt this project to still include some of the Web 2.0 technologies with face to face instruction. 

Last year I decided to have a class debate, on a whim, because my students asked for it. I threw together a lesson plan where we debated criminal justice reform, since there is an entire unit on crime and deviance in society, and my students absolutely loved it. Even some of my shy and quiet kids were really engaged, I was amazed by their talking points and research, and how professional they were during the debates. Thinking about this year and the potential that we will be learning digitally I was wondering how I could keep this lesson still for my kids since they enjoyed it so much. Well thanks to this class, I was able to adapt!

I thought about using Diigo for the students to collect their resources/research and annotate findings, but I did not think my students would enjoy Diigo and find it easy to use. It just doesn't have that teenager "social media" feel if you get what I mean. I decided to go with Pearltrees because I think it will be easy for them to use and similar to other technology tools and social media platforms that they are familiar with. Pearltrees even has a Google Chrome extension so it is easy to save websites and add them to their collections, and then students can leave comments on the different resources as they work together to build their talking points. 

We will do the debate on Kialo.edu over two days, and the students will leave their comments and talking points for the pros and cons of criminal justice reform. I am excited to use this new tool and I think my students will enjoy the visual aspect of the debate. 

Then the final piece will be individual reflections on the debate that the students will record and post to Flipgrid. This lesson will take an entire week, this is the same amount of time we spent on the in person debates last school year. 

I really enjoyed getting to design this lesson, build the student examples, and put everything together. The most difficult piece for me has been the design paper, I have the design down but I need to go back and find the research and readings that match. This has been hard because I cannot remember what we read during which weeks in class- if anyone has any suggestions on specific readings that I should reference please feel free to comment. I hope everyone else has survived this semester and I look forward to catching up reading some of your blogs this week. 

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