A Bakery, Pharmacy and a Snack Shop: Microloans from Students

Last week I introduced the students in learning.21st to the idea of microloans. I was partially inspired by a blog post but mostly by a lesson my wife was doing with her 2nd graders. It is not often when a lesson can be interchangeable between 2nd graders and freshman. I started the class with a good old fashioned read-a-loud of One Hen. A short clip from a PBS Frontline episode provided a nice personal narrative of how the love of peanut butter leads to direct support of small business in the developing world. It also gave a nice overview of how microfinancing and Kiva.org works.

The students were asked to consider their criteria for lending money and worked in small groups to choose a person from Kiva.org to support. Each group had a few minutes to introduce their candidate for funding while we looked at the business profiles and saw each location in Google Earth. After the pitch, we voted via a Google Form and the top two candidates received $25 microloans.

The challenge for me is to take the lesson to the next level. There was great discussion about equity, privilege and life experience. We lent money to groups of people to causes we deemed worthy. I would like to take the lesson to the next level so please share your ideas in the comments. Other than commenting on the lender pages and sending messages I feel I am missing an opportunity to build on a great first-time lesson.

At the end of class there was a mystery donation of $20 from one student. I quickly made a additional loan to a small bakery in Samoa hoping it would maybe in some small way offset some of the recent tragedy as a result of the tsunami. The lesson clearly impacted one student all by itself, but now should I build on it to further it in for the rest?

Plate Tectonics...In Google Earth!

Google Earth is the textbook! It took a couple of classes but I finally figured out what to say to the students that were trying to figure out why we never seem to use a textbook while learning about new topics. For my most recent project the students used a customized KML file in Google Earth to explore the idea of Plate Tectonics. Students navigated different areas of the Earth to learn about the different plate boundaries and the landforms associated with them.

Every region of the Earth is paragraph in the textbook. The Pacific Northwest - Cascade Mountain Range is a paragraph. Iceland and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a another paragraph and so is the Mariana Trench.

All the placemarks that have been deliberately created are sentences (I created them in Google My Maps). Every YouTube video, every image and every word is helping to tell the story and emphasize the main idea.

Although I spent a lot of time putting the content together, I could finally sit back in (not really) in class and watch the students take it in at their own pace. If a student wanted more, we turned on the Wikipedia or volcano layer. If a student was struggling, we focused on the videos. Easy!

This book is different than the ones I never use in the class. It is dynamic. Almost every class period used different KML file because I would discover errors or glitches and correct them for next class. It is differentiated. The content can easily be adjusted based on the learner. It is also chalked full of media. I heard an NPR story about curiosities at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the next day students were watching relevant YouTube videos of the only liquid sulfur cauldron this side of Jupiter. That wasn't known when my textbook was published.

Just saying. Thoughts?

Click here for the most recent version of the Plate Tectonics KML file.

MEGAmap - MN Geology via Google My Maps

The nine map...five class...differentiated...jigsaw My Maps project was a success. Here is a link the to the actual student-created interactive map. After completing the project I gave the students a survey using Google Forms. Surprisingly, they loved the survey and gave me great feedback. Here is a glimpse.
























One thing that was encouraging was the relatively small number of issues there were related to the technology. I suspect the number one issue that teachers might have wading into a MEGA-technology project would be the tech issues. In reality, the trouble spots arise the first day when a small handful of students will struggle to remember a password or a login name. Other than that, there are a few issues related to embedding but the groups usually help eachother out with that.

The two best parts of a project identified by the students were working in groups and learning about iGoogle (all students signed up for iGoogle and subscribed to an RSS feed of my homework). Hmmmm, interesting. The two worst parts were other people editing placemarks and not having enough time (at least 3 hours of classroom time).

After the map was complete, the students were given a take-home exam and the task was to teach an adult about the MN geologic history using the their notebooks and the Google Map.

The response from parents? iGoogle was cool and it was neat to see what their kids created. Success!

Got a idea for a project? Post it in the comments! Thanks!