What fires them up?
By lesleycoe on Nov 4, 2008 in General Thoughts, Language Arts, Social Studies and tagged google, Writing
Of course by “them” I mean students! What are they passionate about? How do we as educators extract that passion from them?
In another attempt to find ways to engage students in writing across the curriculum, I have discovered the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future project. This is a collaborative effort between Google and the National Writing Project to encourage people between the ages of 13-18 to write about issues that they believe are pertinent to their future. In this project, students compose letters to the next President using issues that they care about as their topic.
Visit the project homepage to see an Interactive map of topics students have already written about. At the time I wrote this post, 5845 letters from 201 schools had been received. The tag cloud on the project homepage is a visual representation of the topics students wrote about, the larger the words, the more letters that have centered around that topic.
What fires your students up?
Stumble It!
1 Comment(s)
Interesting question! I believe if a topic is presented as ho-hum, then it will be perceived as ho-hum. In my experience, students get excited, “fired up”, if the TEACHER is excited. Sort of a domino effect, if you will.
On the other hand, if you are talking about inspiration and motivation, we all know that some kids are extrinsically motivated while others are intrinsically motivated. So, how do you light the fire under the intrinsic kids? For me, at least, that has been a burning question through the duration of my career.