When We Make It Relevant Students Take Ownership: The DILo Project: Going Into Week 4
The DILo project is truly taking off. I love seeing the students of South Hills High School embrace this challenge and internalize this opportunity for student choice and voice to have a major impact on the digital culture shift that is taking place in their school. The best part about this project is the relevance that it provides. Students are not only solving a real problem in the today's learning environment, but have been empowered to be the main voice to make change happen. As a side bonus, this project is also authentically preparing students for success in college, career and community leadership. More importanly, the DILo project is Igniting in every project team member a passion for learning while encouraging student achievement, leadership development, stakeholder collaboration, respect for diversity, equity in access, perseverance and commitment, and continuous improvement to the current state of the learning environment.
One thing that I noticed throughout this project is that when needed, students do know how to use technology in productive ways. The team planning hub we use is Slack and most of the students are all over it. Slack allows for the project teams to take all the tools they use for communication, file storing and sharing, and list/project management in one place. It's been awesome to witness them use Slack in ways that I didn't initially conceptualize myself. Meetings are organized and hosted within this platform with 100% attendance with some groups. Some are using the mobile application to post images in team private channels as they come across ideas that align with the team's vision. Then conversations take place where students are analyzing and synthesizing at a pretty high level. Students are even learning to keeping calendars in OneNote and have figurd out how to get the updates to show like an rss feed within Slack. It's amazing to see what students are capable of doing when they find relevance in the task.
Each team is required to make contact with their TCU and Huckabee Mentors on a weekly basis. With this, everyone is learning to communicate with adults on a professional level. From week 1 to Week 3 the level of growth when making contact via email or virtual chat is like night and day. I've been impressed with the confidence that has been gained based on the real-world experience the DILo project provides. The students are learning to articulate themselves to allow others to visualize ideas and build product buy-in that is starting to create a real passion within everyone involved in this project. I can't wait to see what the next 8 weeks will bring.
