Students Starting To Blog And I'm Considering Critical Thinking, Creative Commons And Innovative Mash-Up: A Couple TEDs To Juxtapose

My latest side project idea is to start to put together a presentation for my school's sophomore English teachers in anticipation of our 1:1 laptop program moving into the 10th grade next year. I'm working on this in conjunction with the work I'm doing with the four other technology resource teachers, which is to determine a set of hardware and software functionalities necessary for our students, as we begin the process of renegotiating our laptop lease. So I want to try, in this post, to connect these two projects, and point to a couple powerful TED videos.

Our sophomore English course, along with all courses at our school, values critical thinking and writing skills, and asks students to exercise these skills while exploring these essential questions: What kind of world is this? How should I live in it? In my presentation to the group, I'm hoping to show how the critical thinking skills translate to all the elements of keeping a self-directed, academic, student blog, much like the long-standing sophomore English assignment of the commonplace book.

The difference being that all that collected, hyperlinked, referenced, reorganized information is being shared publicly; copyright must be an issue. And the connection to my school's functionalities selection process is that our Director of K-12 Instruction suggested that we seek a tool that allows students to create and design "innovative mashups--empowering students to interact with traditional curricular content in ways that will nurture and develop and expand their creative and innovative capacities." So here are the TED videos: first, innovative mashups; second, creative commons.