Highlights from the Web on Classroom New Media

David Wiley wrote about the cool experience he had by inviting his students to submit their homework writing assignments via a public blog.

The result was a teacher’s dream — the students’ writing became a little longer, a little more thoughtful, and a little more representative of their actual intellectual abilities. And this benefit came by simply asking students to submit their homework through a different channel. They were already going to write and submit it; I was already going to read it. This was a true two-for-one.

Salman Khan has been creating small video clips on YouTube that teach a modular concept. He's got over 1400 of them up so far at his Khan Academy. In an interview with Jon Udell, he talked about how cool it would be if kids created their own video clips in the same way. (Listen at about 33:00 for that particular sound bite.)

William Thomas blew me away with an EDUCAUSE presentation about getting students in a university setting to use online tools like wikis to radically improve the mega-class-size freshman history courses. His goal was to introduce these students to the craft of writing history without overwhelming the instructor with an ungradeable raft of papers. The solution feels like a win-win.

Tanya Roscorio had a good piece in Converge Magazine that provided a quick-read overview of some of the ways teachers are using "tech" in the classroom, including such fancy tech as pencils.

Sharon Bowman has a very clever summary of some principles in brain science that might encourage us to try interesting things in the classroom. She calls them her "six trumps."