Students connect around the world

Nick Ianniello

Mineral Independent

A group of Superior High School students are going to be using technology to connect with and learn from students from all over the world in the coming months.

“What this project is, ‘How do we redesign education to meet the needs of today’s digital learners?’ That’s what we’re going to be discussing with students all over the world,” said teacher Diane Woodard.

Students will be taking Woodard’s Global Classrooms class along with Maureen Jones’s World Literature class as part of the world-wide program.

The Superior High School Students involved are part of a group of 300 students in the United States, Qatar, Australia and Pakistan that will be looking at how today’s students learn and how the new digital tools of today can best be used to help educate students.

“It’s a really fun class because we get to interact with students from all over the world,” said Jessica Yarnall, a student involved in the class.

Woodard said that students will be using wikis (websites updated and manipulated by the students), social networking websites and mobile tools to communicate and learn from the other students involved in the program.

“These kids are the Net Generation, they actually interact and create things on the web,” Woodard said.

Today’s students are referred to as the Net Generation because the internet has been a large part of their lives since birth. Web sites like Facebook and MySpace are everyday tool for these students which Woodard said should be used to teach them.

“Basically what we’re seeing is that kids power down for school. They wake up in the morning and they’re using Facebook and Myspace and they’re plugged in but when they get to school we’re trying to lecture at them and they just shut down. We’re not meeting their needs because they’re digital learners,” Woodard said.

Students working with this international program will be using a social networking program called Ning, that allows them to post content, profiles, pictures and discus ideas in a safe controlled environment.

Woodard and Jones, along with the other teachers involved in the program have control over the content on the Ning and only students and teachers involved in the program have access to it.

“We just watch the process and make sure everything stays safe and is moving along,” Woodard said.

Through Ning and several other programs students will be able to discus coursework as well as cultural issues that interest them with students from around the world.

“I think the biggest issue is going to be understanding cultural differences. When kids read about a culture in a text book it’s so stagnant to them but if they can interact and ask questions, they get a much richer understanding of their culture,” Woodard said.

As part of the program, Superior High School was given a grant that purchased an iPod Touch for each student in the classroom.

Students can use the devices to get online, look at videos on YouTube and work on projects for class. They also download applications for their iPods that allow them do use them as calculators, read newspapers and even track the stock market.

While they students also can download games and music to the devices, Woodard said that getting students to use their iPods for both school and entertainment is part of the learning process.

“They have games on them, I‘m not going to tell you that they don’t,” Woodard said.

She went on to say that the students have told her they enjoy using the iPods for class because they fit their learning style. The iPod resembles a cell phone, a device the students use every day, and because of that it fits into their learning style.

“If we hand a student a textbook and they’re just reading about another country they’re not really internalizing it and understanding it. So we need to find ways for these kids to collaborate and in the digital age we have those means,” Woodard said.

By allowing students to learn and communicate at school in the same way that they do at home, Woodard hopes to better connect with students and help them to better understand material in not just her class but others as well.

“We had a staff member that was concerned these students would be using these things in classrooms other than ours and I said ‘Good, I’m glad to hear it.’ That was the intent of the project was to not just use them for our classes. Why do we care if they pull this out and use it to get the definition of a word rather than thumbing through a dictionary,” Woodard said.

Since the devices operate on a wireless signal, Woodard uses her cell phone and a wireless router to create hotspots so the students can use their iPods wherever they want.

“As long as I have wifi, the world keeps turning,” joked student Travis Stroot in class last Tuesday.

As part of their class the students took a trip to the University of Montana in Missoula and demonstrated to a group of foreign college students some of the applications they use on their iPods.

Students showed off applications that let them manipulate digital pictures, or keep up with the news.

“I think these students are going to get a lot out of this program that they’ll be able to apply not just in high school but in college classes as well,” Woodard said.