'New Media' in class - other people's great ideas

Aschool from Sydney's southwest makes blogging a significant part of every day encompassing multiple subject areas. Some of the ones I especially enjoyed (described in an article by their teacher) were;

* Uploading a video of a performance of Macbeth - and having a discussion about it with a 'partner' school in Scotland.
* Engaging boys in literacy - having a blog dedicated to football and having boys update ladders, answer questions etc. on Australina, English and European footy results
* Science - posting photos and results of a science experiment, which then lead to needing to do more research and clarify their descriptions in order to answer questions from classes in different parts of the world
* Making reviewing thier class blog a part of each days' usual business - to review comments, plan what to do next etc.

Pericles, K. (2008). Happily blogging @ Belmore South. SCAN, 27(2), 4-6 http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/schoollibraries/

Todd Wright's class in Nevada, USA sounds even more digitally focussed and all kids have laptops. The article focussed on literacy, though this is just part of what they use laptops for, and activities include;
* vocabulary - students use an online thesaurus (or maybe dictionary) to confirm meaning and then text editor to write a sentence using the new word and then search the internet for a picture that illustrates their sentence.
* pair sharing - (I didn't quite get how this happens but like the effiency of allocating ahead of time rather than in lesson time) kids are pre-allocated 'buddies' to pair share with for activities, who they will IM rather than speak with.
* when doing independent work in literacy lessons (eg. while a smaller group is reading with the teacher), kids access graded worksheets or activities linked through class website (and hence easy to find) or updates or comments on online book reviews by other kids reading the same book in class.

The authors make the point that technology is a given in these children's lives and the biggest difference in his class was the quality of engagement of students.

Barone, D., & Wright, T. E. (2008). Literacy instruction with digital and media technologies. The Reading Teacher, 62(4), 292-302