Transparent Classroom

Transparent Classroom

“We must prepare students for their future, not our past” – David Thornburg.

Our students can “one-hand blind” text, organize a lunch date, find any factoid on Google or Wikipedia, and post videos on YouTube, Facebook or Flicker while “listening” to an in-class lecture. Education must harness these technological social skills and abilities in order to cultivate their intellectual lives. Placing individual netbooks into Modern World History students’ hands will create a Web 2.0 classroom with students web-browsing, pod casting, collaborating and networking while learning course content. This will close the digital divide between teacher and their students. Students are empowered to use and develop their 21st century skills in their education as they access online textbooks (Pearson Success Net) and educational video streaming (Discovery United Streaming), and create collaborative documents (Google docs, wikis, blogs). This will create communication transparency to parents and administrators through access to the school website (Schoolloop) and through the student created Web 2.0 applications. The availability, instruction and permission to explore video journals, pod casting, blogging, and live streaming while collaborating gives the students a unique voice in their own education while using the media they are most engaged with and most comfortable using.


Providing students with the permission to interact with, question and create the content of their curriculum is the definition of education ownership. The audio, video and textual inputs required for a digital classroom engage all the learning modalities (kinesthetic, visual and auditory). This program will directly affect 170-200 students of Modern World History. The benefits can be measured by the volume of student generated, classroom/teacher initiated web content. Effectiveness will be gauged by the comparison of standard content instruction in the same grades, subject matter and school. Parents, fellow students, teachers and administrators would have access to the content and instruction as well as the ability to comment through wikis, blogs, e-mail, surveys and chat rooms. When funding is available, live web-casting (Ustream.com) of the classroom environment would follow close behind. Picture a classroom viewed by and in touch with its community. Truly an education that would be transparent, genuine, relevant and engaging to the students. It would prepare them for their future.