Blowing Students’ Minds: Unleashing the Power of a Community
Professor of Educational
Dr. Alec Couros is a professor
of Educational Technology
and Media at the Faculty of
Education, University of Regina.
He has given hundreds of
workshops and presentations,
nationally and internationally,
on topics such as openness in
education, networked learning,
social media in education,
digital citizenship, and critical
media literacy. His graduate
and undergraduate courses
help current and future
educators understand how to
use and take advantage of the
educational potential the tools
of connectivity offer.
remember a time in my classroom when a student came up
to me and declared, “I have no idea what to blog about.” All
of my students develop their own blogs, and although I try my
best to facilitate content that is rich with writing ideas, students
sometimes need a little push to boost their confidence. So, rather than
provide my own list of writing prompts, I decided to try something a bit
different. I opened a Google Document, titled it “Writing Prompts for
Teacher Candidates,” shared the document publicly, and crowd-sourced
the document on Twitter. Within seconds, the document lit up with
collaborators. The once-blank document came alive with writers from
around the globe, who shared their best ideas to prompt student writing.
The list soon became quite long, and authors soon developed categories
and moved sentences across the document. In this wonderful, creative
chaos, there was a beautiful sense of order. My students watched this
happen as I sat back in glee and said, “So, do you have something to write
about now?” My student, inspired by what she just witnessed replied, “Yes!
So many ideas! But I think I’ll start by sharing how you just blew my mind.”
Don’t tell students how to
succeed with technology.
Tap communities to
instantly break through
“In this wonderful, creative chaos, there was a
beautiful sense of order.”
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