Two great classroom moments

So yesterday I got all my 7th graders signed into their Moodle class for the semester. As the students came walking in I had written on the board one simple question:

How old is the World Wide Web?

Our first area of study in the class is the history of computers and the history of the Internet, so it made sense that the web turned 15 years old earlier this month that we talk about it. 7th graders are either 11 or 12 so the web as we know it today has always existed. When I asked them the question their answers ranged from 30 to 20 years old. When I told them it was only 15 one kid looked at me and said “No way, I thought it had been around forever!” Gotta love Middle Schoolers. We talked about the web for awhile and talked about what the web allows use to do, how easy it is to communicate using it.

My second great moment was when I met the 18 students who are in my media 2.0 elective. 18 6-8 graders who all signed up for the class on their own. I took role and asked them where they were from and what technology do they like. Cell phones, games, IMing, etc. I was impressed at the wide range of answers. One kid even said he loves to program. We talked about my idea for the class, that really I don’t know if this is going to work, but that if they wanted to help me, we were going to create something special. We talked about a name for our web site (their first homework assignment) and talked about the potential this idea has. Of course one of my boys asked, “Can we make money at this?” to which I answered, “Sure, why not, we can place some Google ads on the site and see what happens.” This got the kids all excited and so we set our first goal: To make enough money that we can have our own funded pizza party.

Not a bad goal seeing we were sitting in a room that wasn’t finished that has no computers no desks and no chairs. I totally felt like a small Internet start up company. Not that I know what that feels like, but that feeling of hopes and dreams and not having a lick of hardware to get started with. The laptops will be in by Wednesday when we meet again and hopefully we’ll have the name for our site. The kids left the class still talking about our hopes and dreams, our desire to do something different. This is going to be fun!

[tags]media 2.0, Conversation, SAS[/tags]

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