My virtual teacher is planning an amazing week long collaborative experience for her virtual students. My face-to-face students are invited too. Here is an excerpt from her email that explained this excellent opportunity for me to witness some of her best work: "I am attaching the Shakespeare Festival schedule for you. Unfortunately, many of the sessions are in the evenings so won't be as accessible for your class to participate, but the Tuesday session at 10:00am will be great. K. is an 8th grade Language Arts teacher who is wonderful! In fact, he has made a few recordings for the festival that we will be playing each day to let the students know about what is happening that day. In your training course (in Educator), I loaded the banner I have on my announcement page so you can see what it looks like and can access the link for the session. You will also see a link for the first day's recording that introduces the whole festival so you can see how we can use audio to engage kids. :) This is one of 6 recordings we will play over the next week.
If you would like to log into any of the evening sessions, that would be fine, too! Here is an Elluminate link...
You can also view the Shakespeare Festival page on the FLVS website. Beginning on Monday, you will be able to view our Shakespeare Idol contest pages and see some of the projects students have created."
I spoke with my teacher about the importance of collaborative online experiences for students with special needs. She said that although all students reap significant benefit from working together, students with reading disabilities seem to benefit most. They are able to learn through their areas of strength (speaking, listening) and gain perspective so they can better understand related text.
Gifted learners enjoy the detail of collaborative events like these. They enjoy the history and drama, as well as the related literary experiences.
I am very excited about our upcoming collaboration. I will report in full on Tuesday evening.
2 comments:
The Shakespeare Festival is very exciting and shows that there are collaborative activities taking place in the virtual school. I can't wait to hear more about it on Tuesday. I'm interested in the details behind the ways in which the students interact with each other during the festival. I'm also interested to hear your students' feedback from the event.
Ah, yes Billy Shakes. I think this is a great project. Hopefully, your students will be able to participate as much as possible and it will really help give some legitimacy and background knowledge for their future studies of the master bard.
I definitely agree with what you said regarding students with reading disabilities. In my own experience I have seen these students struggle with Shakespeare's Elizabethan English dialogue. I have also witnessed how much it helps to play videos and audio recordings of Shakespeare's plays and to have fellow students explain, in their own terms, what is happening in the play. I think when it comes to Shakespeare it is very important for student's to derive their own meaning and make the connection between life today and the timeless themes of Shakespeare's stories.
-Justin
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