Two more reasons I love 9th graders
Observing a 9th grade history class yesterday, I witnessed two interactions that blew my mind.
1. During lunch, several students used discarded lunch trays, staples, pens, and tape to craft foam Sidekicks and ENVs with sliding, flipping, and popping ’screens’. They then wrote notes on paper, folded them up, placed them inside of the closed phones, and passed the whole phone to a friend. The friend would them flip, slide, or pop open the screen to access the note. The recipient could then write a response, fold it up, and return the whole package.
When I first observed this, I assumed they must be studying industrial design. Nope. The created these engineering and design challenges on their own. One student came in to class excitedly describing his plans for a “Sidekick-ENV” hybrid while another two students discussed possible solutions for creating a better sliding mechanism using pins and elastic bands. All of this is happening during lunch and on the sly during classes.
The classroom teacher was equally fascinated as I with the DIY phone phenomenon but, she lamented, the kids were not nearly as innovative in their approach to cleanliness. There were little piles of foam shavings at nearly half of the tables.
2. Before the start of class, I also overheard this conversation:
Student A: “I just switched from MySpace to GMail!”
Student B: “What is GMail?”
A: “It’s like Google’s email. It’s cool. I’ve been emailing people all week. I don’t even use MySpace or Facebook anymore.”
B: “What? That doesn’t make sense. Who do you write to? No one even uses email.”
A: “I KNOW! That’s why it’s so cool!”
Last year’s alarming edu-blogger revelation that “the kids don’t use email!” has finally come full circle! These students are more sophisticated than even the best of us is giving them credit for.
I LOVE THE KIDS!
Tags
design, education, email, highschool, kids, literacy, media, mobile, teaching, technology, teenagers, todomundo
