Scribes
I would be remiss if I did not mention the use of scribes in blogging. Darren Kuropatwa developed the concept. A different student in his class is responsible for the daily scribe post. Here is his assignment for the blog post:
Write a brief summary of what we learned in class today. Include enough detail so that someone who was away sick, or missed class for any other reason, can catch up on what they missed. Over the course of the semester, the scribe posts will grow into the textbook for the course; written by students for students. Remember that as each of you write your scribe posts. Ask yourself: "Is this good enough for our textbook? Would a graphic or other example(s) help illustrate what we learned?" And remember, you have a global audience, impress them.
Read a thorough explanation of the scribe posts on Darren’s post “Distributed Teaching and Learning.” It is a simple idea that has brought forth amazing results. This exemplifies pedagogy at its best because you can see the results of improved learning and teaching as you read through the class blogs and the teacher blog. Darren writes about the impact of having daily scribes on his students and his teaching and it is profound. Read what he says on The Scribe Post. He has even developed The Hall of Fame on a wiki entitled The Scribe Post Hall of Fame. Other educators have embraced this concept and are listed there. Darren also mentions other teachers using scribes in his post.
Darren is a math teacher but the pedagogy is easily transferable to other domains.
I think this is one of the best concepts developed for putting pedagogy into the tools that we use. And it was done on a blog, the number one tool!
