Shake Up Learning: Ch. 12: Go Global

To be honest, I need to help my students connect with the world more. I have encouraged students to seek out interviews for their National History Day project, but only a few have taken the initiative. I should provide more guidance to my students to connect with the people they would like to interview. My students have publicly published to the web, but we did not seek to share out on social media. This year I am planning to have a twitter hashtag for each of my classes where students can tweet out their work to a live audience. I can connect with other classes that are doing similar work for peer review.

I was thinking about the entrepreneurial learning tasks of students creating online businesses where they can sell real or imagined goods (which we would make obvious to our audience, of course). Perhaps this work could be published to an authentic audience, especially if the online businesses are selling real goods. Students could publish their research findings for my history, psychology, and sociology classes. Students could even poll people online for their research purposes.

It would be pretty cool to find a person that could be a primary source for a historical event that we might be studying.

Bonus Challenge: How can we go global?

This year my students will be sharing most of their work with a public audience. I haven't decided if I want to use Blogger or Google Sites yet. We will also have a class Twitter hashtag, where students can promote their work. More specifically, we could work with local businesses (Economics class), or create studies that we can work with professionals on (Psychology or Sociology class), or we can talk with authors and professional historians, or create museum exhibits--maybe a contest for the class?--for a local museum (US History, World History class).