Outside of AU, I’m a tutor with an organization that takes homeschooled kids in the DC area to various local art museums. While there, the students are given essay prompts and write about the wide array of artwork they observe on any given week. As great as this organization is, they’re a bit stuck in the past when it comes to technology; there’s no centralized website and their only means of communication is through email. In many ways they’re actually quite disorganized. Over the past week I’ve been toying with a few ideas on how these issues could be remedied.
One of my initial ideas would be to create a centralized blog on which the students could post their essays and comment on their peers’ work. There’s very little “classroom interaction” the way things are now—it would be great if they could see what their classmates are working on. This blog could include links to a variety of teaching resources as well.
Since most of these kids are 13-18, I’ve also been thinking about how social media could be used for their benefit. Almost assuredly most of these kids are on Facebook or Twitter—why couldn’t this be used as an educational resource? The handful of tutors that work at this organization only get to see the kids once a week. Why couldn’t there be a joint-run Facebook group/Twitter account that the kids could use to ask questions during their writing process?
These kids don’t get to see their classmates that often and I believe that bringing any form of digital interaction to their learning experience could only help.