I've actually tried a few things since starting the Pi2.0 course. None of them have been exactly revolutionary, but for an old 20th century type like myself, I guess they were a good start.
First I started using the class wiki more -- well, using it period. I hadn't at all since a couple of the kids created it last fall. I think the first thing I did was to post some things that the kids had brought in for vocabulary class. We had been spending part of each class talking about individual strange or interesting words, slang, grammar oddities, etc. -- usually stuff that I brought in, and most of it picked up from a podcast I like called "A Way With Words". So finally I had a week when they had to bring in something themselves. It could be a phrase or a bit of slang that they hear a lot and wonder about, a particular word they really like or dislike, a pet peeve about language, or some examples of "crash blossoms", "Tom Swifties", or "mountweazels" -- all things we had talked about in class. (Too complicated to explain here -- ask me sometime.) Anyway, so we had a couple classes of the kids just bringing those in and sharing them, which was fun, and then I realized that I could collect them all and post them on the class wiki for all to see. So I basically just put them all into a word document, turned that into a pdf, and put a link to it on the wiki. Maybe not the best way to do it, but it's the one I was able to figure out, and it worked fine. In the future, I know, I could have the kids post their contributions themselves, but I haven't quite attained that level of web-enlightenment yet, or courage -- or trust, really, that the kids would do it in a timely and decent fashion. I'll try it next year, though, and maybe they'll prove me wrong.
My other experiments were all for history class. We were talking about a bunch of the key figures of the Enlightenment (Newton, Descartes, Galileo, etc.), and as usual I had gathered pix of all these people from Google Images to show in class while talking about what these folks had done. In the past it's been hard for the kids to see these pix again later, unless I created documents that included them and then printed/xeroxed those. I've done that, but it's expensive, it wastes paper, the xeroxed pix are just black & white, and it's way too costly to print them out in color. But this time, thanks I guess to Pi 2.0, it finally dawned on me that -- duh -- I could just post them on the web. I spent a lot of time on it, and there's probably a more efficient way to have done it, but I ended up creating a collage for each person, using both pix and facts, turning them all into pdfs, and posting them on the class wiki. So there was all the basic info, plus color pictures, posted on the wiki for all to see (and print out for themselves, if they really wanted), and for all to study before the test.
Later we covered the American colonies and the American Revolution. I went through it all the first time in my usual way -- talking and using the white board (gasp!) -- and I'll probably continue to do a lot of that in the future, by god. I like doing it, and I think the kids actually like it -- or most of them anyway. Yeah, it's a lot of me talking, but it's also a conversation, and it's personal, and I'm really into this stuff, so I think my own enthusiasm makes it more interesting. And I do, and probably still will, insist that they take notes of their own the first time through, because it forces them to be more alert and engaged, and because you learn things just by writing them down. But this time, when we were done, I created a study guide that included all the material we had covered, with fill-in-the-blank questions and pictures, and posted it on the class wiki. The kids studied that and when we had a test on it, the questions came straight from it (though I had put them on index cards and let the kids draw them randomly). When we get to the big Jeopardy game, in which we review everything we've covered in the course, that study guide on the colonies and the Revolution will still be there for them to use in their study groups. Here, too, I know there's a further step I can take -- having the kids create their own study guides and post them, or having them collaborate to create one central study guide. I'll probably try that at some point next year, although I'm skeptical about how well they'd do it on their own, how equitable the contributions would be on such a big collaboration, how thoroughly they'd cover the material -- even just whether their sentences would make sense. We'll see.
And then my most recent experiment, just this past week, was to use Flashcard Friends. We had covered the Constitution, with lectures and note-taking about how it had come about, the basic contents of each article, the 27 amendments, etc. In the past I would've just had them study their notes, maybe in small groups so that they could help each other fill in the gaps. But this time, thanks to Pi2.0, I decided to make a deck of Constitution flash cards and post them online. It ended up having about 150 cards, some of them even including pictures of the key players. We had a couple of days when the kids broke into their study groups and went off to study on various laptops and desktops. (Though we had a big scare the first day, when we discovered that Flashcard Friends was blocked. Thanks to Brian and co. for quickly responding to my distress call.) After a few days of that, and of the kids also using it on their own at home, we had the test, and the way I did it was to open the deck on my computer, project it on the whiteboard, and have it pick questions randomly, by setting the deck on "shuffle". Now, none of this was especially creative and I didn't expect it to make much of a splash, but the kids really seemed to like it, most of them got the material down cold much more quickly and thoroughly than I expected, and just the simple suspense of not knowing what question would come up next made the test itself more interesting. We spent the entire period on the test and went through 40 or 50 cards, but they didn't complain a bit and were actually kind of into it. This particular kind of material -- with fill-in-the-blank questions and occasional longer answers -- doesn't adapt well to some of the Flashcard Friends features. You can't really use the "true-false" or "multiple-choice" options when testing yourself, for example. But even with fewer modes available, it was very effective. Again, I know, there's the further step of having the kids create the flashcard deck themselves, or together as a collaborative thing. There wasn't time to try that this time -- with the end of classes nearing we're moving pretty fast and I had to just create the deck myself. But, as with the other items above, I'll probably let them try it next year, despite my doubts about how well they'd do it.
Like I said, nothing terribly daring, and I haven't ventured into having them do collaborative stuff online yet, but hey -- baby steps, right? I'm an old and especially stubborn dog trying to learn some new tricks.
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