I was asked by the 7th grade Social Studies department to help them with blogging and fishbowl… as if you couldn’t tell from the title.  Anyway… I was going around and around as to the best way to do this with out overwhelming them. In the past my school district had Elluminate which allowed teachers to have “rooms” and have audio, video and text chats.  We dropped that because of cost – which was fine because it unfortunately wasn’t the best tool. Now we have Skype (YAY!) but only for teachers – which again, is fine.

So the question was still, what was the best way to do this with students.  So I went to the small group meeting and just talked to them about my ideas.  We can use Skype to bring in an outside expert to talk with the student “experts” in the fishbowl.  Then we could have the remaining students using a Google Form to submit thoughts and questions to the experts. OR we could use a teacher blog for commenting to keep track of the outside discussion – or a Google Doc……

So after I laid out several options, the teachers started talking about what it was they were looking for the students to do.  What they really want is several groups within classes talking/reviewing with several groups in other classes.  The teachers specifically want the students to review WWII topics – Holocaust, Atomic Bomb and other topics.  The groups would just respond to each other as a way to review the content before the standardized test. So… while this really turned out to not be a fishbowl activity, I was very excited to get the teachers on their blogs.  They are already drafting the basic blog post they will use to get the student discussions started. I suggested that they re-post it for each class period – that way each class discussion will start fresh.

They are looking to do this activity at the end of February.  Hmm… we will see how it turns out.  I’m looking forward to it.