Voice Thread

I uploaded several photos of the internationally famous people who have had an effect on social change in the past. Hitler, Nelson Mandela, Bin Laden, Martin Luther King and Barack Obama. The task is for students of a high school age to make collaboratively comment on each image. Did they have a positive or negative impact on society and explain your comment, why do you think the way you do. This form of learning instigates higher order and creative thinking according to Bloom's taxonomy. Student's are involved in the processes of creating, analysing and evaluating(Pohl, 2000). It is a way of having conversations around media, in this case it is images but you could also use it for videos, documents, and presentations. The collaboration of this can far extend the classroom. Student's from around the world Can make comments via telephone, web cam or text. Younger children could also comment on images relevant to their age. For example if a teacher wanted to teach acceptance, behaviour and the way children should treat one another an image could portray a socially or culturally diverse scenario and students can comment using the microphone if they are too young to type and spell or it could be a mixture of both. Children could collaboratively choose a range of their own images and together they could comment on images as a group process. The images could then be shared through the cyber world to other classes or even schools.

When students work in teams they often have the opportunity to work with others from dirretent social and cultural backgrounds and according to Kearsley and Schneiderman (1999) Engagement Theory this facilitates an understanding of diversity and multiple perspectives. A lesson regarding social change places an emphasis on providing an authentic setting for learning. Social change is something we can all be aware of, the digital natives (Pensky, 2001)can benefit in being exposed to world history which has significantly changed our world as we know it today.