Shelley Wright

Shelley Wright's class constructed a complete Holocaust Museum as part of a school project.

This past school year, Shelley Wright, a high school educator in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, made a number of big changes in her teaching practice. The class went paperless and used a Wiki, she incorporated project-based learning and collaboration into her lessons, she experimented with “vessays.” All along the way, she documented everything on her blog Wright’s Room — not just operational information, but how those changes affected her view of learning and her relationship with her students.

It took a lot of courage on Wright’s part to just jump in with these new practices. Since her blog already reflects her own opinions about the changes, I wondered what her students and the students’ parents felt about them. I asked Wright to send out a query, and here’s what we learned.

First, here are some responses from students about the class’s built-from-the-ground-up Holocaust Exhibit, the epitome of project-based learning.

• “It was a great experience for me to learn different kinds of work. For example, painting, sewing, sound system, and working with different peers each day. I think that I could learn as much from a textbook but it for sure wouldn’t be a fun and enjoyable way of learning. Before this, I thought that learning and school was that you sat in a desk for the day and wrote paperwork and math equations and different types of exams. I see now that school subjects can be taught in a more unique, fun, and enjoyable way for the students. It will help the students think positive about school and they will want to come and learn.”

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  Shelley Wright

  Students work on the Holocaust exhibit.

  “We were given the opportunity to go into any aspect of the holocaust. We weren’t told to study certain things and had limits on what we wanted to learn. People just went into what interested them most. I wouldn’t have been able to learn as much as I did if we were only using textbooks. Sure, they put the important ‘stuff’ in there everybody needs to know, but with the Internet, anybody can put things on it. So you can research anything and somebody will have something about it. Like, who would have thought that not only the Jews had stars. I definitely see learning differently after that project, because during the entire project I was kinda my own teacher. I wanted to know about something, I researched it and I was able to teach others what I learned and vice-versa. Usually I learn things only for the test and then after that, it’s out of my mind two days later. But for this, what I learned doesn’t get out of my head, because it’s all things that interested me and I actually wanted to learn.”

• “Suddenly the information wasn’t just information – they were real stories – this project has made a lasting impression for me. Before [this project], learning consisted of novel studies — reading a book and answering comprehensive questions. During this project we read novel(s), then got into groups and researched what we were interested in learning more about (compiling our information onto a shared Google Doc) and finally as a class we came up with a way to present everything we’d learned. It was a great experience and opportunity.”
• “Not only did I get to show my work, but people got to see the talents I have. I think it’s easier to pay attention to people than a book. Also, I couldn’t rely on the teacher anymore, I had to rely on myself and my classmates; which is a lot harder than you think.”

And some thoughts about Wright’s paperless, collaborative Wiki system:

• “Not only do I get to see my opinion, but I get to see others as well. I usually have a hard time answering questions, so seeing opinions from other people can be very helpful.”

• “I like how you can go and see what your peers have written and collaborate from that and make it better. I also like how we’re not sitting in a classroom writing on a piece of paper but actually having class discussions about the questions and answers in class. I wish that I could change how some of the students didn’t choose to go and write answers on the wiki and left it for the students who were answering every time.”

• “It improved our team working skills and it was just really cool to work with! I loved that everybody could put their own thoughts into one thing and others could read what the others were thinking. Because some people think differently than others and view situations differently. What I didn’t like about it was that around the middle, people stopped posting and left it up to other people.”
• “The thing that I liked about it most was that I could access my work pretty much 24/7. We all know that teachers have a life outside of school but that doesn’t mean that they don’t work on school-related things. With the online wiki, if Mrs. Wright posted something new over the weekend I could start working on it asap, regardless if it was during school hours which I really liked. I wish that every class could have a wiki.”

A couple of parents also weighed in about how Wright’s changes seemed to affect their kids. A few quotes below:

• “[My daughter] has really enjoyed working in this way and is excited about her projects. I think it makes her feel her high school assignments are more on par with post secondary work than middle to elementary school projects, using these techniques. It also gives her a feeling of maturity and preparation for the last years of high school and gives her a look through the window at the work skills required in any post secondary studies she may pursue.”
• “I think the most powerful thing [my daughter] experienced was the Holocaust museum, and the great deal of work it took to create it. Every night at dinner we’d have an updated progress report, sometimes successes, sometimes frustrations. We noticed that she would put in many long hours researching and creating her parts of the museum. She was also very excited about presenting her work to the public.”

These comments prove to me that the hard work and perseverance Wright poured into her class have been incredibly fruitful. She’s made herself vulnerable, taken risks, and trusted her students — a true sign of a fearless teacher.

By Sara Bernard

The Bering Strait School District (BSSD) in Alaska –  which spans a swathe of land and sea the size of Great Britain — is one of the few districts in the nation that has replaced textbooks with online content that can be modified by any of its teachers, students, parents and anyone who wants to participate. The school district uses the same user-generated software as Wikipedia — an open-source, online interface that allows everyone in the district (and outside of it) to access and edit learning standards, curricular materials, and projects.

John Concilus, educational technology coordinator at BSSD, told me about the district’s Open Content Initiative and offered his views on the future of open source materials in education.

Q: How and why did BSSD begin its OpenContent Initiative?

A: Roughly five years ago, we got the idea for this from a really well-known treatise by someone named Eric Raymond. He was part of the original open source software movement. He wrote eleven precepts about how and why open source projects should be built and why it’s better to use a “bazaar,” or free exchange of ideas, versus using a “cathedral,” or top-down, regimented approach. When I read it as an educator, I was really interested in its application to school curriculum.

The idea is that the more eyeballs you get in front of an article, the better the quality. If it’s very participatory, it gets very good. I was passing copies of Raymond’s ideas around and that’s how I got others really excited about it. It was very appealing to us as educators. I don’t think ten years from now I’d want to be in the curriculum materials business. I think knowledge wants to be free.

Q: How much did it cost to start the program?

A: Very little. We were convinced it was the right thing to do, so it wasn’t difficult to start the program. I donated some energy (some “sweat equity”); we built it, showed teachers and administrators what was good about it, the curriculum department people put up some posts.

Rick Holt, who’s now a principal in Roaring Fork, Colorado, was our curriculum coordinator then. [The IT team] supported it technically, he sold it to the teachers and administrators, and it grew and grew. Getting that buy-in was important, but it’s free software that runs on any Linux server. Using open source content has a little bit of a learning curve, but it doesn’t cost anything.

Q: How often do teachers use and modify this content in the classroom? Is it a large part of the district’s curriculum?

A:   Teachers use it all the time, every day. [Note: In addition to the BSSD wiki, the Data Analysis and Reporting Toolkit, or DART, is an online, open source information system that helps BSSD teachers use student performance to shape their teaching and helps students understand what they need to accomplish.] Using the wiki and DART are both on teachers’ evaluation instrument. They have to be comfortable with it. We train them all and make sure it’s used. But it’s not just a job requirement — teachers use it because it’s useful.

If a teacher is planning instruction, for instance, and she sees that there’s a weakness in polygons, a teacher can link from the DART system to the BSSD wiki’s polygon page [where there are multiple educational resources]. Now, that material is there not only for the student, but also for teachers who are teaching the same concepts.

In other words, it’s more than just a textbook type of thing — it’s a collaborative space that supports our curriculum. The wiki allows students to really demonstrate competence about a standard. If you look on the links at the left side, you’ll see that it grew to have all sorts of projects associated with it. For example, we wanted to get the kids involved in place-based education. So, instead of assigning worksheets, teachers asked students to create entries for a multimedia dictionary for Inupiaq [one of the region's local languages]. The kids put together the only comprehensive multimedia dictionary for this language that’s out there. They did it all piecemeal, too — different teachers, different students.

Q: Are there educators outside of the district who use or modify the site’s content?

A: Of course, it’s more useful for people in our district, but because it’s open content there are other districts who have taken all fourteen thousand pages. And that’s fine. Anything that’s posted to our wiki is open and free for anybody to use.

This also means that our students get a real, outside audience for what they’re writing. For this dictionary project alone we have anthropologists from Russia and the Czech Republic really interested in the content that the kids have created. Several school districts in Alaska and Maine have contacted us, interested in trying a similar approach.

Q: What’s been the reaction from parents and students?

A: I wouldn’t say parents use it to the degree that teachers and students do, but parents, community members, outsiders like anthropologists or whatever, all can and do use the system.

Parents can long into their kids’ portfolio on DART and click on what the student needs to know, for instance. But many of these families live in isolated communities with out great infrastructure or technology, so parents use is not as high as you would see in other environments.

And the kids like doing it. Kids are social networking creatures, and this is a social network, basically. You get notified when someone makes a change. It’s very natural for them; I think they prefer interacting with it than some of the traditional assignments. If it’s about engagement, that’s half the battle. If the students want to participate, they’re going to learn more from what they’re doing.

Q: Are there any pitfalls? What are the challenges of this program?

A: There is a bit of a learning curve. But we just installed a new interface a month or two ago and it’s much improved, much easier to edit. It takes out the barrier that we used to have, which is that you had know a little bit of “WikiText” to use the system. It was cumbersome for some users; you had to know about six or seven tricks. Some training was required. But that’s gone now — that pitfall has been removed.

Another challenge is getting teachers and administrators to feel comfortable in an open environment. People are terrified of openness, thinking that bad things can happen. As a school district, we have an obligation to protect kids from inappropriate things, but we’ve had every few incidents. The more people you have sharing responsibility for monitoring the wiki, the better. Something inappropriate might exist for a moment, but we can take care of it very quickly.

[Note: BSSD is not an entirely one-computer-per-student district yet, but, says Concilus, "We are close to that ratio.  Perhaps 1.2348 to 1. We don't believe there is a magic ratio, but shoot for 'ubiquitous access to technology' instead. This means that we try to ensure that technology any user needs (teacher, student, etc.) is available when needed. This was improved over the last year by using Ubuntu Linux netbooks for elementary students."]