Guest Speakers

Wow today in class we had several guest speakers. The first thing that I must mention is that a few of them were not even in our classroom! They used a video conferincing called Skype and a virtual world called Second Life. I have not explored Skype yet, but I intend to. I have blogged about Second Life previously.

Bringing guest speakers to the class in this method gives students a sense of belonging to a larger world. I imagine it would also be easier to line up guest speakers since you are not limited to a location. My third graders would not be able to meet a speaker in Second Life, but could benefit from Skype. Since each classroom in my school has a projector, my students could easily be a part of the conversation. It reminds me a lot of ICN on a larger scale.

Our first guest speaker, Steve Hargadon, created the classroom 2.0 ning. He said something that really resonated with me and I believe will have the greatest, easiest impact in my teaching. He commented that in school he wrote many papers that he still has to this day, that were only viewed by his teacher, himself, and his family. Students want a broader audience for the work they do. By publishing student work on the web, then others could view it. This could be by posting to a class blog, class newsletter, or in the final step of the writing process, publish to the web instead of a nice handwritten copy.

Our other guest speakers expanded my awareness of educational uses of Second Life. I also heard about the NETS, which I suspect will be used by many schools in the future as they write their standards.