Summary of Service Learning as of October 26th 2009

Things have been a bit slow while getting the Cluster Challenge Program up and running. A big part of the success of Service Learning is communication with your community partners. Unfortunately, communication hasn’t been the best and in the beginning visits to the high school, we basically had nothing to do in relation to web 2.0. Now that the channels of communication have finally been established, real improvements in the program have been taking place.

On our first visit to Kennedy High School, we were presented, along with the middle school students, the course project that we would be assisting on. Before the next visit to the High School, my co-project manager and I taught our Bentley Students about Web 2.0 and gave them examples of things that are web 2.0 such as blogs and wikis. After we instructed them on how to use a variety of these applications, we went to the high school. During this visit we worked with the middle school students and helped them find ways of implementing web 2.0 tools in their projects. For example, instead of making a diary on old fashioned paper they could use a blog, or instead of making a poster board they could use Glogster (web 2.0 application for creating digital posters).

To help the middle school students learn how to use blogs, I created a step by step guide of how to create a blog and make posts to it. The teachers will use this tutorial as a guide for them, and also for their students. Another project that two of my students is working on is creating a video tutorial with voiceovers to inform and illustrate how to use Glogster for the teachers and students.