On your marks...

I may have underestimated my students (again..must remember to be less over protective that way).

Before the end of last term I wrote about my concerns and reservations regarding the rather ambitious (aka stupidly new) project I'm launching with my Drama students next week (Leaping into the deep end..).

A couple of things have happened during the last two weeks to have me peeking my head out from behind the storm shelter door with a little bit of hope in my eyes.

First of all I was checking all the Project Rooms and came across this:

A few things made this find exciting:

For starters, MY Project Rooms look like the rather boring example to your right. Which means I have no idea how to do what they've done...and I'm jealous...and so, so proud. This is what teachers need to learn to accept - we don't know more/better some times and in fact there's a heck of a lot we could learn from our students.

Continuing in this theme of pleasant surprises I logged in to do a daily check of school email (hey, I limit it to once over the hols...that's a break :)...isn't it?) and had an email from a student in a different cyberdrama group. I've asked them to carbon copy me any organisational emails between group members so I can assist/guide them as they need and keep a finger on the pulse, so I was pleased first of all that this group remembered. But more than that this student had emailed his group with a reminder of the things they discussed and organised in our last Drama lesson of the term and what each of them is responsible for next week when we're back at achool. So many things about this impressed me:

• How often do teachers dismiss students as disorganised/unmotivated/slack/forgetful? Here I have a student taking the initiative and being RESPONSIBLE enough to PLAN AHEAD...he got ahead of me this time...I'm not sending out reminders till the end of the week.
• In his email he has also accoutned for our access issues when it comes to technology - over the hols he's purchased his own webcam for the group to use to get a particular "feel" for certain aspects of their cyberdramas. Again, this is so much more than I ever expected.
• Finally - we're still on HOLIDAYS! A similar thing happened last year with the cyberdrama unit I tried then too, students logged in and engaged over the hols - a sign that elearning spaces and projects have potential to remove the borders of our classrooms? I think so!

My only concern now...will I have the energy to keep up when I let them loose next week?

Give them credit

Sometimes we don't give our students enough credit.

I've been reading over the last assignment for Year 10 (14-15 yr olds) Drama. It was a responding task where they were asked to evaluate cyberdrama as a a "real" form of drama and present their (supported) opinion in an ezine article (which I'm going to spend a few days putting together into a webpage for us within the network.

This has been their second responding task this year and admittedly I was a little nervous - as I've spoken about before the cyberdrama unit has been a rather tumultous one with varying degrees of success (often on a lesson by lesson basis), plus they'd shown resistance to responding tasks earlier in the year (afterall all Drama is is standing on a stage reading lines, isn't it....that opinion has now been changed - thank goodness).

I've been really impressed with the standard of these articles and some of the observations they've made. This one, I just had to share:

As years go by, and we head further into the 21st century, our need for knowledge is greater and the time we spend to seek answers has become less. With the creation of the World Wide Web, and numerous search engines, we are able to find a world of information just with the click of a button. There are endless possibilities to what the Internet can be used for… - Student K, 2008