MixedInk in the classroom
April 29th, 2009 - Posted by: vanessaMixedInk is excited to be participating in the Innovation Incubator Program at this year’s SIIA Ed Tech Summit in San Francisco. We’ll be presenting at the conference and demoing in the exhibit hall – there’s also a virtual exhibit set up at: http://k-12.veplatform.com – check it out!
For those of you who have been tracking MixedInk’s progress, you might be surprised to see us at an education-focused conference. While our platform was originally designed as a tool for citizen engagement, we’ve been excited to see a lot of use among educators. We have also had other positive feedback from educators; aside from being selected for this conference, we’ve been covered enthusiastically by a number of education blogs, the service is being included in MIT’s New Media Literacies learning library, and – most importantly – teachers have given us great feedback.
Within the classroom, it generally works as follows: First, a teacher sets up a project for their class describing the collective text the students will create. Then, students submit their own versions of the text, edit their peers’ work, and weave different versions together to form new ones. At the same time, students comment on submissions and rate different versions to bring the best written, most popular ideas to the top. At the end, the class can explore the strengths and weaknesses of the top-rated collective text(s).
Using a democratic and collaborative system, the tool encourages students to take creative risks in their writing, understand varying perspectives among their peers, evaluate the quality of what they are reading, and gain experience working as members of a team. The process increases student engagement by building on their online behavior outside the classroom, fostering a sense of community among students, and enabling peer-to-peer learning.
