Best+Practices

=Best Practices in 21st Century Learning=

Please add your school name and describe any projects that you would like to share.

Tools for asynchronous student/teacher interaction:
VoiceThread GoogleEarth GoogleDocs

A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show comprised of images, documents, and videos. Participants advance from slide to slide, adding their own comments in writing, recording themselves speaking or recording video using a webcam. Click the VoiceThread graphic to go to their website.

Several teachers at Harpeth Hall use VoiceThreads in the classroom; specifically, our modern world language teachers create VoiceThreads containing a couple of images, about which the teacher poses several conversation-starter questions. Each student posts her own answers to the questions, with the end result being a host of comments spoken in the target language for the teacher and students to hear. Click the Play button in the VoiceThread below to view an example of this type of project. Please contact Melissa Wert (mwert@harpethhall.org) for more information.

media type="custom" key="4882399" align="left"

VoiceThread has an educational version for K-12 schools, providing a secure network for teachers and students to create and share VoiceThreads. Pricing is extremely reasonable (click the ed.VoiceThread graphic to get more information).

[[image:google_earth_1.JPG width="292" height="201" align="left"]]
Google Earth is a wonderful tool to provide geographic perspective to history, literature and current events. Google Earth is free software which may be downloaded and installed on any number of computers. From the Google Earth site: "Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, [|3D buildings], from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places, and share with others."

Visit Harpeth Hall's Google Earth wiki to learn the basics of using Google Earth.



=== ===  Harpeth Hall 5th graders read //Black Star, Bright Dawn// by Scott O’Dell during an Iditarod cross-curricular unit. Students are assigned a real-life musher to track as the actual Iditarod race progresses. Using a Google Earth map containing all of the race checkpoints, students embed 3 - 5 journal entries written from their musher’s perspective at specific checkpoints along the trail. Students also keep a log of their musher's daily progress at the Anchorage checkpoint, providing a summary of the race when their musher finishes. Following the race through Google Earth gives the students a sense of space, geography and terrain that enhances the creative writing process.
 * Middle School Project**

Iditarod Trail Maps (odd and even years)


 * Upper School Project**

Harpeth Hall sophomores complete the project “Traveling the Novel” which uses Google Earth to explore Khaled Hosseini’s novel //The Kite Runner//. The simulation combines satellite maps, videos and photographs with the text. Students immerse themselves in the journey of Amir, the novel’s main character, as he travels from Afghanistan to Pakistan, to California, ultimately returning to Kabul, where Amir atones for the sins of his youth. Because landscape functions as a character in Hosseini’s novel, exploring the terrain allows students to envision the political and personal conflicts of the story.

Students are provided a Google Earth "Kite Runner Starting Ponts" map (see below) which is divided into six folders: Your World, where students locate and mark their own homes and school; Region Overview, which provides a geographic context for the beginning of the story; and Parts 1 – 4, which map significant landmarks from the four main sections of the book (Kabul, California, Pakistan, and Afghanistan). The place markers in these folders serve as starting points for each student’s individual journey through the text. Students are also given a Kite Runner Google Earth Itinerary (see below) which directs them to “Travel To” the specific locations already pinpointed on the map. At these sites, they follow instructions on the itinerary telling students to quote from the text, to add images, to view videos, or to reflect on the situations connected to the location. Other steps on the Itinerary require students to “Locate” certain places by using the search feature of Google Earth (for actual sites, such as the San Jose flea market) or their own imagination (for Amir’s house in Kabul, for example). At each location, they must add their own place marker containing quotations from the text, relevant images or videos, or reflections on the importance of that site, as directed in the student Itinerary.

Please contact Melissa Wert (mwert@harpethhall.org) for more information.

[[image:google_docs.JPG align="left"]]
Google Docs allows teachers and students; students and students; colleagues and colleagues; etc. to work on documents collaboratively on the web. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files may be uploaded to a GoogleDocs account, where the "owner" may share the files with others, granting them permission only to view the file or to view and edit the file. All editing is done online in real time, eliminating the need to email documents back and forth or worry about having the “latest version” of a file.

GoogleDocs is one feature of GoogleApps, which includes other services such as email (gmail), websites, calendars and more. Google has an Education Edition of GoogleApps - click here for more information.

Middle School students participating in Model UN use GoogleDocs to collaborate on information-gathering about their countries and planning for the Model UN conference. Harpeth Hall eighth graders use GoogleDocs in English to capture and share summaries of class discussions about books they are studying. Each student is assigned one or two chapters from the current literary work they are studying and she is responsible for updating the class GoogleDoc with answers to discussion questions covering key points from those chapters. By the end of the book, all students have a thorough recap of the book, chapter-by-chapter, based upon classroom conversations and activities.
 * Middle School Project**

Harpeth Hall juniors and seniors who take a Current Issues class create and share a GoogleDoc with their teacher the first day of class. Throughout the semester, students answer questions posed by the teacher and write reflections on stories or news clips reviewed in class. The teacher is able to insert comments directly in the GoogleDoc for students to read immediately. Students also create and share GoogleDocs with their teacher when writing in-class essays, turning in papers, and taking quizzes. Upper School English teachers have students use GoogleDocs when writing collaborative essays or other writing assignments. Feedback from students and faculty alike has been enthusiastic due to the ease of use and decrease in printing and email usage.
 * Upper School Project**

Please contact Melissa Wert (mwert@harpethhall.org) for more information.