The concept behind the post is that of closing the circle. One of the common pitfalls with technology in the classroom, especially things like blogs, is that students research and create awesome material, but this material doesn't come back into the class. The students just do the work and then move on. Closing the circle means bringing this work back into the classroom and letting it inform and enrich the class.
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The example in Jeff's blog uses student blogs in a flipped classroom to drive a fishbowl discussion. It is super well designed and I couldn't recommend it more. I think that this concept could be applied in tons of different ways. For example, student blogs, reflections, and questions early in a unit could be used to help shape the direction of the unit. Or research done by individuals or groups could be used as the basis for a class discussion or to build a research base that the whole class could use when working on future projects. There are a ton of possibilities, and I think this concept would do wonders for a classroom!
Whoa. This is mind blowing stuff. Some would even consider it rad. I can't think of how many times I researched something, wrote about it (whether it be an essay or online posting), and never thought about it ever again. A difficult aspect of the discussion portion is always content area for me. I've battled with ideas for using blog postings or video research presentations for math and have a hard time rendering any good solution (it's a bit easier for science). This idea of closing the circle actually answers a lot of the questions I had about implementing this into a math classroom atmosphere.
ReplyDeleteLogan, I love this. I am a very anti-worksheet future teacher and I'm always looking for ways to engage every single student in my classroom and get them to all be involved in the problem-solving process in various roles because this often creates diverse perspectives.
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