TSoF Masterclass

Barbara is a lecturer in English, and the Director of The Project for Integrated Expression at Middlebury College, Vermont. An active implementer of new media and social software into literature and writing classrooms, her special interests include digital storytelling as a means of academic discourse and integrated web technologies as a vehicle for expression, community-building, and student-centred learning.

Barbara Ganley’s Masterclass presentation:

Centering, Connecting and Creating: Transformations in Blogging Classrooms

We’ve all heard stories about the remarkable outcomes teachers claim by bringing social software into the classroom.  But enhancing the learning experience for our students is not simply a matter of “handing out blogs” like notebooks and then standing by to watch the miracle; nor is it a matter of setting up series of strict rules and parameters and methods.  By thinking first about the nature of our learning community and our pedagogical framework, and how connecting students to themselves, one another, and the world makes sense in our classrooms, we can take powerful advantage of the connectivity and the transparency of the medium. And once we’ve seen the effects of blogging on our students, we’ll find ourselves blogging alongside them, and adding podcasting, skype, RSS, and digital storytelling into the blogging as ways to make learning exciting and effective for every student.

http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/