The challenge of engaging and
extending high school students is no less of an issue in the
Information Age.
Now that tasks such as searching the internet for resources on
famous people are “ho-hum” teachers must find motivating contexts in
order to see that learning really does take place in class.
A purpose behind required research and a real audience for the
finished product can make classrooms buzz with excitement.
|
Learning quests allow students to employ
higher-order thinking skills and, as four students at Hobart’s Ogilvie
High School have shown, can be a rewarding option for publishing
historical biographies for students who like to blur subject boundaries
and apply skills in information and communication technology to their
mainstream classroom activities.
Faced with the challenge of exploring the concept of leadership and
writing about it, the Ogilvie girls opted to producing a learning quest
on the theme “Women’s Winning Ways of Leadership.”
Believing that women have played, and will continue to play, important
leadership roles in society, the four chose, researched and celebrated
role models who showed a variety of leadership styles by making a
website inspired by their lives and legacies.
The leaders profiled are Australian Mum Shirl Smith, Marie Curie from
the world of Science, courageous human rights activist, Daw Aung San Suu
Kyi and two Americans from different generations, Gloria Steinem and
Oprah Winfrey.
By writing about the influence of these people who became heroes in the
eyes of others, the girls aimed to help all young women who use their
site to gain an awareness of their personal leadership potential.
Their website analyses the lives of their chosen role models with
consistent headings, giving fast facts, early life, stages of
achievement, lasting legacies and the traits and characteristics that
make each one a great leader. There are also quizzes, crosswords,
discussion forums and polls, which allow young people to test their
knowledge and express their opinions.
Team members identified the following points that their role models had
in common: optimism, determination, perseverance, the ability to learn
from experience, to work in teams and to motivate others.
The girls not only discovered the theory of influencing others but
learned on the job that co-operation and communication are important
factors for women striving to achieve leadership positions.
“We had to work really hard at co-operating. At the beginning of making
the website, we were all doing different things and not working as a
team. To overcome this, we had to communicate with each other, letting
all four team members have a say and giving each member a special
responsibility.”
With a number of government bodies and charity organizations providing
incentives for students designing original websites, the Ogilvie girls
took their project beyond what was originally envisaged, negotiating
more time to achieve their goals from several school subjects and
meeting together outside school hours to prepare their site for several
national and international competitions.
They were shortlisted in the ATOM awards in 2003 (Australian Teachers of
Media) and travelled to Melbourne for the awards night at the Centre for
the Moving Image. Though a national prize eluded them, they found the
stimulation of the occasion really energized them and provided them with
a standard to aspire to.
The Global SchoolNet Foundation, a US non-profit organization, provided
further challenge and collaboration with students right around the
world. The “leaders4tomorrow” team, as they had called themselves by
now, responded enthusiastically by developing their website for the
Doors to Diplomacy challenge, which offered as its major prize a trip to
the USA, funded by the US State Department. They won a certificate, but
had the satisfaction of being placed in the top two in their category.
Doors to Diplomacy, like the other support programs for which Global
SchoolNet is both catalyst and mentor, seeks to identify, support, and
encourage effective practices and programs that engage students in
meaningful personal exchanges with people around the world to develop
communication skills, create multi-cultural understanding, and prepare
them for full participation as productive and effective citizens in an
increasing global economy.
The Doors to Diplomacy experience enabled a practical experience of
diplomacy skills for all participating students through a carefully
supported peer assessment process.
By now eight months had elapsed since the “Leaders4tomorrow project” had
taken on a life of its own. The site had attracted some 11,000 hits and
been visited by viewers on all continents. Schools in South Africa and
the USA listed it as a recommended resource for their students and while
its creators went on with their lives without giving it much thought,
the website started showing up high in searches on a number of search
engines.
Then came an e-mail which seemed too good to be true. The Project
Manager of the Cable and Wireless Childnet Academy, based in London, UK,
had found “Women’s Winning Ways of Leadership” on the web and wanted the
team to put themselves forward for selection for an international
training session for young web developers. Teams selected would be flown
to London for a week-long leadership program, bringing together young
people from all around the world to work together to learn from a team
of internet experts and mentors drawn from the worlds of education,
media, business and the public and voluntary sectors, to take their
technical skills to a new level and continue to develop their online
projects for the benefit of others.
Cable and Wireless, a British telecommunications company, had sponsored
the Childnet Academy by establishing a web development fund of thirty
thousand pounds, to support inspiring internet projects that have been
created exclusively by young people.
“We thought it was a joke but we entered it anyway” said fifteen-year
old Courtney.
Six months further down the track, with the web counter now reading
17,906 hits, Courtney was in London, being interviewed live on ITN News
while her team-mates, Ayda, Anneke and Anita, were in the EMR radio
studios recording their own interviews, fed later that morning to
commercial stations right around the British Isles.
What a source of pride for these young Australian students, to be
respected as truly global contributors, to spend time with their peers
from the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Taiwan, India, Panama,
Jamaica and the USA.No doubt the experience of these young Tasmanians will encourage their friends and many other young people to think widely and confidently, to grasp opportunities and, with the support of teachers who believe in them, to convert traditional classroom assignments into genuine knowledge products and perhaps to discover for themselves new knowledge that they can disseminate on a worldwide scale.
|
