Every week, each student will be assigned to a "team."Their team will be responsible for certain tasks that will contribute to everyone's learning. When I was taught this system, it was called a "Digital Learning Farm" because just like on a cattle farm or soybean farm, everyone who works there contributes in someway to the functioning of the farm. In our Digital Learning Farm, everyone in the classroom contributes to the learning of everyone else.
Here are the teams and a summary of their responsibilities:
- Official Scribes--Each week the official scribes take notes on the things we are reading and learning. They post these notes to an internet page that everyone can view if they want to review what we've been doing.
- Tutorial Production Team--This group is charged with creating video tutorials of the concepts we learn in class. These tutorials can be used by students in our class to help them master topics..and also by students around the world.
- Global Collaboration Team--This team is in charge of making contact with classrooms around the globe. They will be emailing other teachers and classes, trying to make as many contacts world-wide as possible. They will also be managing any projects that we're working on with other classes. Finally, they'll be using twitter to share our learning with the world.
- Social Justice Team--This team will select a social problem to focus on...and then leave their mark by trying to help solve it. Oh, and they'll blog about it, too.
- Research Team--We have a class of curious thinkers. And they have lots and lots of questions. Every week, the Research Team will collect our questions and post them to our class "Wonderwall." Then they will help find the answers to those questions. They'll also be given certain research tasks along the way to complete so that they build their research skills.
- Learning Documentary Producers--Each week this team will produce a "learning documentary" of all the things we've learned about and done during those school days. They'll produce a podcast and post it to the web so that everyone can see the exciting things we work on from week-to-week.
