Digital Scribes

            Two things struck me as I read Chapter 11 in our book, Curriculum 21, in the section on students as contributors on the “digital farm”.  First, I really liked the notion of having an ongoing class blog that students are responsible for contributing to daily.  Each class, a different student writes the blog, where they write a summary about what was learned in class that day, including diagrams (very useful in math!)  I went onto Darren Kuropatwa’s linked website and read his article, which goes into much more detail about student scribes, called Distributed Teaching and Learning.  Very interesting.  I can see the potential for using this in my own classroom.

            Also, under the next section in our book titled “Researchers”, it describes a Goggle tool where you can create your own subject specific search engine through Google’s Custom Search Engine creator (www. google.com/coop/cse/).  You can eventually have a very specific search engine with only reputable resources, like government databases or scientific organizations.  I didn’t know that anything like this existed out there!  I know, just from my research on our comparative education project last week, that there is a lot of different type of resources when searching for a specific topic, some good and some bad.  I think it could be very useful if we could limit this to credible, specific resources for our students.