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Author: Connected Learning Alliance Summary: This connected learning case study spotlights The Harry Potter Alliance, examining how utilizing the principles of Connected Learning allows the organization to engage a fan community in a variety of real-world civic action. It could be useful as part of an introduction to Connected Learning for teachers new to the theory, or as an advocacy tool for teachers working to create more space for connected learning.
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Author: Connected Learning Alliance Summary: This profile of a 14-year-old aspiring photographer from a New York City public high school illustrates the power of connected learning, showing what is possible when a young person is able to openly pursue a personal interest with the collective support of friends and compassionate adults. It could be useful as part of an introduction to connected learning for teachers new to the theory, or as an advocacy tool for teachers working to create more space for connected learning.
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Author: Lorna Collier Summary: This short article outlines the findings of Troy Hicks and Kristen Hawley Turner’s Connected Reading: Teaching Adolescent Readers in a Digital World. The book uses survey data and in-depth interviews to explore the reading lives of middle- and high-school students, and the ways teachers are using technology to connect school reading to adolescents’ reading worlds.
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Author: Stephanie West-Puckett Summary: Educator Stephanie West-Puckett describes her experience using collaboratively designed digital badges as a networked, contextual, and participatory form of writing assessment in a college first-year writing course. She describes how this “community-based assessment” supported diverse conceptions of writing and prompted critical discussion about what constitutes successful writing, pushing back against narrow definitions of success and deficit approaches often imposed by rubric-based assessments.
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Summary: Youth Voices is a connected-learning site that hosts digital learning curriculum openly available for teachers, based in sound theory about the teaching of writing. You will find incredible student work related to current events and issues, playlists that students and teachers can use, podcasts, and more. You can explore the student writing through the highlighted “Daily 25 Featured Discussions” on the homepage or visit the categories along the top of the page to find student writing on specific topics. No matter how you explore the site you are sure to be drawn to youth taking a stand and writing about some of the most pressing issues of the day.
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Author: Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Whitney Douglas, and Sara W. Fry Summary: This sample chapter from The Activist Learner explores how the school itself can become a site for service learning. Two examples are discussed in detail: 1) engaging students in the process of documenting the school’s history; and 2) transforming school culture through a civic participation framework. A valuable resource for service learning curriculum design, this chapter also focuses on service learning as an important form of inquiry.
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Author: Jennifer Smyth Summary: This collection of materials, inspired by a shared reading in English and Biology classes of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, describes the planning and presentation of Bioethics Day as a “day of learning” for students from three high schools. The materials include explanatory videos and planning information, as well as a description of how the project demonstrates connected learning, and a frank discussion of privacy and the pros and cons of open network projects. This resource may be useful in working with teachers across content areas who are interested in creating projects that invite students to share their learning beyond the classroom.
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Summary: This radio show discusses the book Reading in a Participatory Culture and the complementary digital book Flows of Reading. The show examines what it means to be a reader and writer in an increasingly participatory and social culture, in which readers read across different media and understand reading as an act of sharing, deconstructing, and making meaning. This resource is useful in digital learning professional development and also offers curricular ideas, including an extended discussion of how the authors worked with an inner city theater director to re-think Moby-Dick in this new context. A few sections may be of special interest: at 2:31, Erin Reilly discusses the book’s “big idea”–what it means to talk about reading in a participatory culture. At 10:55 a description of teacher professional development begins. Around 40:20, discussion moves to the Moby-Dick project.
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Author: Paul Allison Summary: This resource offers access to two in-depth discussions about LRNG playlists and corresponding online assignments/tasks leading to badges that youth receive for their career-based digital work. Teachers in the New York City Writing Project talk through the Badge Builder on LRNG in the first video. In the second, Paul Allison (NYCWP) and Chris Sloan (Wasatch Range WP) talk through the building of an entire set of guidelines and digital tasks based on two photography playlists. This rich task-oriented discussion considers students first and takes educators who want to build such a badging system through the process.
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Author: Nora A. Peterman, Lan Ngo, Robert J. LeBlanc, Susan Goldstein Summary: This article describes a study of a literacy video game designed to help English learners negotiate new vocabulary and unfamiliar language structures as they read. The game, collaboratively created on Gamestar Mechanic by a team including a public high school teacher, actively engaged that teacher’s EL students who developed a sense of ownership over their learning. The authors discuss gaming as a literacy practice and suggest how it might be adapted to other contexts. This article may be useful in professional-development discussions of EL students and multimodality and could be a suggested reading as teachers develop inquiry into these issues.