Connecting students with real-world experts

17th February 2007

posted in disruptive-technology, distributed-learning |

Two weeks ago at TCEA in Austin I had a great conversation with Rachael Tucker, who experienced this past fall the power of having her elementary class connected to a U.S. college student studying abroad for the semester in Guatemala. (The student happened to be her daughter.) Rachel pointed out that we need a “matching portal” which can connect K-12 classroom teachers and students with college students studying abroad for these types of sustained conversations about that country’s culture, history, people, geography, food, etc. As a former international exchange student myself (to New Zealand for a summer in 1987) I can personally attest to the value and power of international exchanges– and the desire you feel as someone who has had a positive international exchange experience to share it with others.

Vicki Davis’ post yesterday on TechLearning, “The Future Wave of School Volunteerism: Be the Textbook,” extends this idea of bringing in the experiences and perspectives of others outside the traditional walls of the classroom to corporate America. (And the corporate world in general.) Vicki shares a story of how her class, studying nanotechnology and not finding a lot about the topic in her school library or textbooks, invited a nanotechnology expert to dialog with her students via Skype. What a great instructional example of using disruptive technologies to engage students and enhance the learning environment! Go Vicki!

More teachers can and should follow Vicki’s lead. I agree we need to have portals for “matching” content sources like these (students studying abroad or corporate folks armed with webcams and skype) to facilitate these types of connections.

(Blogged from the Apple Store in OKC!)

On this day..

Oklahoma Students: Modeling Digital Education and 1 to 1 Learning - 2008
Laptops are 21st Century Pencils - 2006
Overcoming Overload - 2005

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 17th, 2007 at 11:24 am and is filed under disruptive-technology, distributed-learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 On February 17th, 2007, Brian Crosby said:

Wes have you seen how we connect and dialog using Skype yet?

http://learningismessy.com/blog/?p=196

2 On February 17th, 2007, Vicki Davis said:

Of course, we can start connecting now with those we know and trust who are located around the country. Yes, and we do need a “massive” database of educators to be matched for flat classroom type projects AND for resources. Otherwise, only the “connected” educators will be able to do such things. Either that or we can help everyone “connect” and learn to use these tools.

Thank you for noticing!

3 On February 21st, 2007, David Truss said:

Wesley,
I remember one of your posts that said you preferred comments to e-mail, so I am posting here.
After stewing over the idea of a portal for some time now, the combination of Vicki’s post, and yours here, inspired me to write about and create a mock-up of a dedicated portal:
http://fieldfindr.wikispaces.com/
I am a digital immigrant that took 25 min. just to figure out how to do the table of contents… there has to be some tech savvy educators out there that can make a ‘real’ portal a reality!
Dave.

4 On February 21st, 2007, Wesley Fryer said:

Thanks for that link Brian, I had read about you working on getting the equipment for that project early in the year but hadn’t seen the video or heard the update. GREAT WORK! David, nice work on the mock-up. I think this should be built? Who will take this great idea and run with it?!

5 On February 22nd, 2007, Moving at the Speed of Creativity » Blog Archive » Connecting learners with outside experts and each other said:

[...] David Truss, inspired in part by Vicki Davisâ€™ post “The Future Wave of School Volunteerism: Be the Textbook” and my post and podcast on “Connecting students with real-world experts” inspired by Texas Teacher Rachael Tucker, has created Fieldfindr: A space where teachers can meet global citizens who have skills that they are willing to contribute to a class. The site is a wiki-based mock-up of an idea (shared by several) to create a virtual portal to connect classroom learners with outside experts. In his post “Portal Needed to Connect Classrooms to the World: Global Citizens can Share Talents and Skills with Students,” David explains his vision of the portal as a synthesis of social networking and web 2.0 tagging aggregation sites: The site could be sort of a combination of Warlick’s HitchHikr and MySpace or Facebook. (In a way it is more of a matchmaker site.) You can sign up and log in as a teacher, or as a willing contributer (Volunteer) in your field of interest. Basically Volunteers create a profile listing talents and skills. Then they set up a time-line of when they would be interested in helping with, or presenting to, a class. Then teachers can contact volunteers who have profiles of interest. There could be an opportunity for volunteers to contact teachers too, but I think this should be done through a contact page like this, rather than by direct e-mail. [...]