Mindblown

Let’s Talk

We won’t involve people effectively in decision making until we’ve helped them become equally well informed SO… as we’ve ALL said before, the first step is to begin informing our communities about what’s happening, and engaging them in discussion about how we can best prepare to meet our children’s needs. How better to do this than to engage our students in an authentic learning task and … make this our student’s project.

Splice Project
I’ve been working with groups of students aged 10 – 17 in my local learning community. Last year I applied for and received funding for the community from the Microsoft Innovative Schools Pilot Project. The funding allowed us to work on an information project with students from the six local schools.
Our objectives were to:
· Inform their community about the changes in schooling needed for 21st century learners,
· To determine how and to what degree the community would like to engage with their schools, and
· To determine how community stakeholders (businesses, services, professions and community members) believe they are able to support school initiatives and learning in authentic contexts … and begin working together to establish partnerships and support for community/ school learning projects.

We call it the SPLICE project.- Supporting Personalised Learning in Interative Community Environments (yep -the world could use another acronym . You can see more of the student’s work at our Spliceproject blog.

The following video is a collaborative effort. Year 6 –8 students, representing each school in the area, scripted ,filmed and edited their own videos to convey their ideas. Parts of all their work have been used to build a collaborative video, representing ideas from the whole learning community. It’s intended to use to this video to help inform our community about changes in schooling for our 21st century learners. We’re posting it in our local Community Website and hope to play it in local shops and businesses, as well as at parent meetings and meetings with community members. I think it’s pretty darn good – but then I’m horribly biased (about 9 mins). What do you think ?