Memorializing Your Mission: Empowering Students to Use 21st Century Skills to Author Your School's Yearbook and Classroom Projects.
Memorializing Your Mission: Empowering Students to Use 21st Century Skills to Author Your School's Yearbook and Classroom Projects. -Ken Willers, Principal • School of the Madeleine
“In 21st Century Learning, students use
educational technologies to apply knowledge to new situations, analyze
information, collaborate, solve problems, and make decisions.”
–British Columbia
Ministry of Education.
As a team of educators
of a Catholic elementary school, our vision is to foster and create an
environment conducive for 21st Century learning. Our vision is one
that builds on the strengths of our colleagues while taking advantage of
emerging technologies to provide expanded learning opportunities that will be
critical to the success of future generations.
Our vision, however,
is not limited only to the learning taking place within the walls where direct
instruction happens, but expands to include the learning experience that occurs
beyond the classroom. For the purpose of this brief submission, we want to
share how this vision was realized by a group of students, who, while creating
the school’s yearbook exhibited high-level 21st Century learning
skills. Our partnership with Picaboo Yearbooks made this amazing experience and
vision of 21st Century learning a reality.
Watching how easily our students
used the Picaboo interface and how quickly they adapted to it was astounding.
Observing the high-level of collaboration and communication between peers was
remarkable. Witnessing the students initiate a process of design and create
such an amazing yearbook—left no doubt in my mind that given the right tools,
and placed in the right learning environment, students would make tremendous
achievements and truly demonstrate 21st Century skills.
It was evident that the technology
we were using to build the yearbook integrated wonderfully with the 21st
Century skills we were also trying to inculcate in our students. “Creativity and Innovation • Communication
and Collaboration • Research and Information Fluency • Critical Thinking-Problem
Solving-Decision Making • Digital Citizenship • Technology Operations and
Concepts.” –Premier’s Technology Council, Vancouver, British Columbia.
2010.
The 21st Century
difference, evident as a result of our partnership with Picaboo Yearbooks, was
that our students achieved all of this on their own—there were NO adults
involved in the design, planning, collaboration or execution of the Yearbook.
The Yearbook advisor merely served as the liaison when initiating our contact.
Our students spent all of their time
memorializing memories and being creative unlike past years when students spent
countless hours trying to navigate around troublesome software. We saw this as
yet another sign that our 21st Century vision was becoming a reality.
Finally, we knew there was something qualitatively different in how our
students engaged the interface because they created the entire yearbook in only
5 weeks.
What would cause a school to have to
create an entire yearbook in such a short period of time? Let us explain.
Last April, at the NCEA convention, a
group of us discovered the Picaboo Yearbook booth in the exhibition hall.
Although, we didn’t want to engage the vendor because our school already had
contracted with a yearbook provider, we were fascinated by the e-yearbook we
saw displayed in their booth and after speaking with the exhibitor learning
more about the customer service benefits we were convinced. Needless to say, by
the end of that day we had signed up and cancelled our previous yearbook provider.
Although, some might consider this a
bold move, we knew, for those reasons alone (cited above), and the fact that no
other yearbook provider could compete, that we were making the right business decision--even with only 5
weeks remaining until the end of the year. What we didn’t know at that moment
was the transformative impact this decision was going to have on our students
and on our vision for 21st Century learning that resulted in moving
from adult driven instruction to student directed learning.
Yes,
it was truly transformational to see our students execute this vision of 21st
Century learning and not be dependent on an adult. As Steve Hargadon, Founder Classroom 2.0; Social Learning Consultant,
Ellumniate, wrote in Education Week, October 2010, “Twenty-first-century learning will ultimately be learner-driven.”
Our
students transformed the process of making a ‘book’ into an experience of creating
‘memories.’ One of them even said, “it’s not about the book, this technology
makes it easy for us to focus on the memories.” Ultimately, the partnership
between Picaboo Yearbooks and our students led us to a deeper realization: that
the ‘memories’ created along with the 21st Century skills applied by
our students, transformed our yearbook into the ‘memorialization’ of our
Mission.
In
response to our students’ excitement, we were visited by the president of Picaboo
Yearbooks, Bryan Payne. After meeting
our students and visiting our school, Bryan summed it up beautifully, ‘Look at what is possible… When innovative schools with innovative
vision, inspire innovative students to use innovative tools…we actually empower
and prepare our students for a future they will be called upon to create.’
But
the story of innovation doesn’t end there…
This
school year, the Madeleine students are partnering with Bryan Payne and Picaboo
Yearbooks to develop grade and subject specific 21st Century Project
books. We are very excited to be a pilot school. Our students using Picaboo
Yearbooks generated this idea. “If we could use Picaboo to create a
yearbook—why can’t we use the same interface for classroom projects?” Bryan’s
response was, “Let’s do it!” So, as of now, our 4th & 5th
grade students are collaborating to create History Project Books. Our clubPYB,
small clusters of students, are creating Event Books, Classroom
Yearbooks, and Collections for Catholic Identity Books and we are exploring
ways to use this innovative technology to generate student porfolios. All these
projects follow the premise of building and using 21st Century
Learning Skills and all projects will be student-directed.
Together,
our students, teachers and the team at Picaboo Yearbooks are immersed in 21st
Century Learning and in response are transforming our Yearbook and our Project
Books into the means of ‘Memorializing Our Mission of Catholic Education.”
View
the video of the School of the Madeleine’s Picaboo Success Story at: http://youtu.be/tX5LPU7RckE
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