A CAIS Dinner Meeting (with New Haven pizza and salad)
Hamden Hall Country Day School - Swain Library
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
5:30 -  7:45 pm

In this evening workshop, questions of transforming curriculum and classroom practices in order to appeal more directly to our web-assimilated, social media-native students will be considered.  Why we as teachers might want to shift our approach to “meet the trade” will be considered in relation to still-relevant educational goals that may benefit, indeed, from a new approach to daily work, lessons and assignments.  Indeed, the more we read that our millennial students are used to working collaboratively, are unused to criticism except when nestled in larger fields of praise, and are more interested in banding together with peers than competing against them academically, the more we may feel that our perennial “big assignments” such as period tests and term papers may need to be permuted, as well. 

Following dinner, there will be a keynote presentation of some web 2.0 applications that can be used to transform daily homework checks and rote learning into collaborative work which allows students to demonstrate various levels of mastery—to each other, as well—and allows the teacher to enter the conversation in real time as commentator and questioner.    

We will then break up into smaller groups to discuss these new classroom methodologies in relation to the following specialty areas:

A.  Presentation and Round Table Discussion on Lower School students, now Generation Z ~ Kirby Mahoney, St. Thomas’s Day School
An exploration of project-based collaborative learning  with the newest cadre of digital natives.

B.  Middle and Upper School Blogging, Journaling and Google doc-ing ~ Bill Hunter, Hamden Hall School, Sandy Wirth, Goodwin College
How to design assignments that will elevate your students’ interest in doing homework and incidental writing—featuring both critical and creative blogging, and collaborative project-based work.

C.  Using Wikis & Edmodo to Promote 21^ST Century Models of Learning ~ Marek Beck, David Saunders, Greenwich Country Day School
Wikis and Edmodo are two web 2.0 resources that we have been using in our daily practices that have lead to increased student motivation, engagement, and achievement.  The examples that will be offered will be put in a context of lessons, activities, assignments, and projects that promote 21^st century skills.