Looking for virtual pals!

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Kristin Warehime on March 15, 2009 at 8:38pm

Hi Karl,
I would be interested in some type of collaboration. I teach 7th and 8th grade reading--typically the lowest 1/3 of the kids in our school, so we wouldn't be a great match if you have a GT class. I have some ideas I have been trying to find a partner for involving the use of wikis for collaboration. Let me know if you are still looking for partners. Kristin

Permalink Reply by Karl O'Leary on March 16, 2009 at 4:35pm

Thank you for your reply. I am certainly looking for someone to work with. Let me know what you are thinking. By the way, I am located in New York.

Permalink Reply by Kristin Warehime on March 25, 2009 at 5:03pm

Hi Karl,
I am located in southern Minnesota, about 1 hour south of the Twin Cities. What I have in mind is a longer-term project, maybe over the course of a semester--that involves partnering kids in distant school to do some type of research and collaboration using a wiki. For example, partners would decide on a topic of interest to them and set up a common page on a wiki. Independently they would do some reading on that subject and start posting reflections/facts/etc on their wiki page. The kids would meet virtually every few weeks to have some sort of discussion on their project. This is really just a vision at the moment. There are a lot of hurdles to overcome and a lot of planning to be done specifying exactly what the outcomes should be. One of my main concerns is that I don't let such a project overtake the purpose of my class, which is remedial reading support. I don't know --comments?

Permalink Reply by Lucas Cioffi on April 6, 2009 at 7:44pm

Hi Karl and Kristin,

When you find your virtual pal, we'd like to support you with our software. We're only starting to introduce it now to the educational world. It's built to make sense of large conversations; this can be ideal when there are many students trying to have a conversation with each other.

The tool is new so it takes a few minutes to learn, but you'll see that many more things are possible when debates and conversations are mapped out like this. Here's the intro video and here's what teachers have said after using DeepDebate.

Regardless of what kind of communication you'd like to have between your schools, we'd be happy to support. We're looking to do some pro bono work for this community to raise the profile of our software in the educational world.

If this sounds interesting, please feel free to drop me a line. It would be great to help you out with a meaningful project.

Lucas
Email: lucas[at]deepdebate.org
Co-Founder, DeepDebate.Org