Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Day 6- Open Procedures

Today we learned our open procedure using our blogs. Open procedure includes opening our blogs up and checking the reader (RSS feed reader on Edublogs) for the day's open task.. We create a new post and title it with today's date. The first line of the post starts with the word OPEN. Students then do the OPEN task from the reader. [I post directions everyday in my teacher blog and students follow me. That way they can see my latest post in the reader.]

For the first set of OPEN tasks, I wanted to practice procedure without having too much going on with the OPEN task itself. I chose to use CNN Student News as my OPENS for the first three days so that I could start building consistency. CNN Student News is an online, ten minute, commercial-free video newscast from CNN that highlights the day's news. Watching it builds students' schema and connects them to the larger world via current events. Additional activities can be found on the site if/when a teacher decides she wants to use them.

http://www.cnn.com/studentnews/

Students then watch the news report and jot down interesting ideas as they see them. I ask that they describe at least three things they found interesting with good details. Students can choose to wait until the end as the news does move pretty quickly. I give students one minute to discuss what they found interesting and another two minutes to record their ideas. Eventually, OPEN tasks will include creative writing and analyzing tasks, but to introduce and practice the procedure, I want students to be comfortable with the task itself. The videos involve high interest topics and are paced for high school students.

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