How do you make sure videoconferencing really meets the curriculum? Do your teachers use VC “just for the fun of it?” or do you have some strategies to make sure videoconferences meet curriculum goals?
Here are a few of the ways we help our teachers do curriculum-based videoconferencing.
- Provide resources that connect videoconferences to the curriculum, i.e. our database with Michigan Curriculum correlations, grade level guides, and designed projects.
- Funding requires connection to curriculum. Our mini-grant forms require that teachers describe how the program fits their curriculum, and how they plan to prepare their students.
In addition, teachers often modify official “matching” projects like Monster Match and Read Around the Planet to meet their curriculum. This fall, a 7th grade art teacher participated in Monster Match with an art twist. The project was originally designed for K-2 classes, but the art teachers realized the value of the project for art instruction. In another match, one of our 5th teachers put a strong math twist on the project. The students had just finished MEAP testing, and every direction for their monster was given with math references. Finally, last year one of our 5th grade classes was matched with a UK school for Read Around the Planet. They were studying the revolutionary war, so they presented about that to the UK school. What an interesting discussion that was!
If teachers know their curriculum well, and have someone to help them tweak programs and projects for their curriculum, it’s very likely that the programs will meet curriculum goals and be a success.
Do you agree? What strategies do you use to ensure “curriculum videoconferencing?”
[…] to make sure that videoconferencing is really fitting into your curriculum? Janine Lim recently wrote about the topic. Janine is a founder and board member of TWICE- Two Way Interactive Connections in Education- […]
I wrote about this topic on our blog a bit and linked it to this post. When I market programs to schools, I try to include Missouri’s “Show Me Standards” (that fit with the topic, of course). You are right, a tweak here or a tweak there can really make a program fit into the curriculum well.
An example:
“Some of the Show-Me Standards this series of videoconferences cover include: Goal 2 – Students in Missouri public schools will acquire the knowledge and skills to communicate effectively within and beyond the classroom. Communication Arts: 1. speaking and writing standard English; 5. comprehending and evaluating the content and artistic aspects of oral and visual presentations (such as story-telling, debates, lectures, multi-media productions); 6. participating in formal and informal presentations and discussions of issues and ideas”
Videoconferencing seems to fit perfectly with that…
[…] we need now is a curriculum videoconferencing glossary. At the CILC Symposium, there was a great deal of conversation related to […]