Chalk it up! (Or should I say, "Mark it on the white wall"?)...Week No. 1 at Queensbury HS is history. After back-to-back Superintendent Conference Days on Tuesday and Wednesday, Room 106 welcomed students to the 2010-11 school year, this past Thursday and Friday. After a brief introduction to the course, English 11 Regents, English 11 Regents Modified, and Sports Literature students, went to work on an assignment entitled, "Great Escape Multimedia Project."
The Great Escape project emphasizes the use of technology as a tool for learning in the 21st-Century Learning Environment, and is centered around work stations in the room that students circulate to. Similar to park-goers traveling from ride-to-ride at The Great Escape, a popular Six Flags themed amusement park in the Queensbury community. The stations for the project include: A SMARTBoard connected to a netbook computer, iMac computer with 27" monitor, plasma monitor connected to a netbook, digital video camera & digital camera, iPad, and more netbooks for GoogleDocs usage. Students use each station to derive an answer to the driving question: Why is technology an important part of the 21st CLE? By the end of the project, each group answers the driving question by adding to the word web established on a wall of the classroom painted with IdeaPaint.
...I left the web on the wall, and each class contributed to the ideas established by the previous class. I felt this lent to more thoughtful responses to the driving question by the end of the last block class on Friday. In the future, I will take timeline pictures of this type of web and share it with students from the earlier blocks, as a review - allowing them to see how the other classes contributed to the ideas they founded.

IdeaPaint is a huge hit with students and an integral part of Room 106. Students wanted to write on the wall, contributing to the established thoughts. Many students asked about the paint, wanting to know if it was something they could purchase for their own rooms at home. A colleague even mentioned she wanted to paint a room in her house for her 8-month-old grandson.
Students enthusiastic about writing...Students wanting to share ideas...Students working together...Thank you, 21st-Century classroom!