My community of Joppa, Maryland, has attracted several high-tech companies that are projected to hire about 241,000 workers in STEM fields in the
next decade. This stunning statistic got me thinking about
how best to prepare my middle school students for their
future careers. They will need to learn how to work in a
global community with people located in diverse cities and
towns on faraway continents. They’ll need to understand
how to interact with people from different cultures. And
they’ll have to learn digital citizenship skills.
My previous experience working remotely with fourth
and fifth graders through the Kidlink project ( www.kidlink.
org) and teaching in two virtual schools gave me insight
into working online with students. I learned, for example,
that students had to add more detail to their writing to be
understood by far-flung classmates, and they had to explain
their thinking to peers who didn’t know them.
I wanted to re-create those experiences with my middle
school students to teach them the critical skill of online
collaboration. To do this, I enlisted the help of two other
teachers in our district: Nina Ingram, the computer literacy
teacher at Bel Air Middle School, and Jill Capozzoli, who
holds the same position at Southhampton Middle School.
Both schools are about 10 miles away in either direction
from my school, and they have the same protocols concerning online communication, access to the same tools,
and a common curriculum.
Our goal was to reimagine our curriculum and make
sure it focused on building the skills that our students
would need for their future careers. We chose to work
on two projects: The sixth graders would collaboratively
research the parts of a computer, and the eighth graders
would create games using Scratch and share them with
each other to get feedback.
This project involved a total of about 1,000 students
who came from diverse communities. One classroom had
a high percentage of students receiving free and reduced-price lunches, whereas the two others were from well-to-do
communities. Two of the teachers had their students for
four rotations, which lasted for nine weeks, and the third
teacher met with students for only seven weeks in five rotations. All three teachers taught two classes of each grade
level during their rotations. Most of the class sizes had between 18 and 25 students, with some as large as 28.
Student abilities varied too. Some students had special
needs, some were English language learners, and others
were advanced. We placed the students with special needs
in our own groups, so we could more easily monitor progress and keep their individualized education program goals
private. But the other groups were mixed, and each of us
monitored six or seven groups at a time.
Preparing the Virtual Classroom
Before we got started, we set up Edmodo as a virtual classroom where students would meet their distant teammates
to discuss research and game design. But first we needed
to help them understand how to interact virtually. The
students logged in to Edmodo, watched a Brain Pop video
on “netiquette,” and then took a quiz about proper online
behavior. After that, we led face-to-face discussions about
how interaction on social networking sites differed from
face-to-face interaction. We wanted to be sure they understood the landscape in this new world.
Once we were sure students knew the ground rules, it
was time for introductions. We had the sixth graders create “All About Me” posters in Word, while the eighth grade
students put down three words to describe themselves and
found three pictures to illustrate them. They combined
those images in Paint to create a single image or avatar,
which they shared with their teammates.
For my high-risk students, I adapted this assignment
and had them write essays because I wanted them to work
on their writing skills to improve their state test results. I
started by introducing students to some of the basic tools
in Word and then taught them how to create outlines, write
proper sentences, and turn those sentences into paragraphs.
After all students created their introduction projects, they
posted their reflections about the skills they had learned
while creating their bios and discussed with their teammates the similarities and differences of their reflections.
Working Collaboratively on Projects
With introductions complete, we were ready to start our
projects. We gave the sixth grade students a worksheet to
guide them through the research process that included links
to specific pages on HowStuff Works.com. Students read the
assigned articles, filled out the worksheets, and shared the
facts they learned with their virtual teammates.
