Forum For Innovative Student and Teacher Learning

Our Advanced 21st Century Leadership team has chosen quite an undertaking this year for our project. This will in fact take several years to see it fully materialize, but the idea began with a trip to Redmond, Washington, to attend the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum. After attending this two day forum in Redmond, several team members on the flight back to Birningham began brainstorming how we as a team could continue what we had learned and how we could present our ideas to our facutly. When Alabama Best Practices and the Advanced 21st Century group informed all second year, or advanced, participants we would need to have a project ready to present by February, 2007, we really began to visualize what had been a thought or a dream. Why not have an Innovative Teachers Forum right here in our great State of Alabama? We can do this with much planning and many trials before we reach the final dream. Thus, we are beginning on November 17 with a trip to Calcadever Elementary School to attend their Culture Festival. We will be traveling fast between November 17th and February when we need to have the first part of our project in final form. This is a project, as I said, that will take several years to see it through, and hopefully will become an ongoing Innovative Forum for our State.

Here is a brief description of our project as posted in Tapped-In.


At Vestavia Hills Elementary East , team members are planning an "Innovative Student and Teacher Forum", a multi-faceted project based on content standards found in the Alabama Course of Study for Social Studies. Initially, team members will travel to Mobile to visit Calcadever Elementary School, taking with them 21st century tools such as digital cameras and digital audio recorders, documenting their time there. The team members will return and compile their informtaion into a podcast they can share with faculty. The project will then extend to the students of Vestavia Hills Elementary East, where third grade students will engage in similar research with technology tools at the American Villiage in Montevallo. Those students will then return to school and present their findings to second, first, and kindergarten classes, who will collaborate to make podcasts of their own. The podcasts, which will be inherently educational in nature, will then be put on a school wiki.

Part of our project also includes a skypecast with a teacher in China, an elementary classroom in New Hampshire, and an elementary classroom in Boston, Massachusetts. This will be recorded, engaged in a podcast, and placed on our blog and wiki. We plan many more such virtual field trips with our project.

The hope is that this project will manifest into a usable tool anyone can access at any time; as well as provide an opportunity for student and faculty engagement and learning.

Our intention is also that this will serve as an ongoing project leading to an idea after attending the Innovative Teacher Forum in Washington of holding such a Forum here in Alabama. We plan to involve faculty members in this project once we have our feet on firm foundation. We hope to have them actually help us "test the waters" by going out and conducting some of the research for us. However, we are a ways from that. Our goal is once faculty bring their research back and we conduct our own "Faculty Innovative Forum", we will be ready to "nail down" details to partner with, hopefully, Alabama Best Practices and others to bring an Alabama Innovative Teachers Forum to our State!
All of our work will be documented on our blog, which will be available early this week, and we will begin postings to a wiki once we travel to Mobile on November 17th. We see this as just beginning and will be ongoing, not ending in February when our project is due. We will have a finalized portion to present, but the entire project is far beyond February. We think this will prove to be a very interesting and innovative project in many ways! We hope you will think so too! This Post was done by Connie Stigler and Christina Tucker on behalf of the VHEE Advanced Team which includes Cathy Wall, Charlote Wilson, and Jo-Ann Walsh