My first mini-breakthrough so I have to share…

I had a meeting on Tuesday with a first-year teacher in my charge who is interested in doing "something different" with his science classes.  We talked about what he’s doing now which was pretty "standard" stuff — lecturing and note-taking.  Then we started to brainstorm a bit about what "something different" would look like.  I remembered reading David Warlick‘s posts about the Science Blogging Conference last week so we surfed to his site and to the conference site.  By the end of the conversation, he had decided that he might want to get a free wiki on Wikispaces and have his class build a wiki for his upcoming unit on the ocean.

I gave him the links and told him we would sit down again next week once we’d had a chance to click around and get a "feel" for the limits and possibilities of a class wiki.  This is uncharted area for both of us so I also charged him with beginning to think about a framework he may want to lay out for his students.

Within a half-hour, another science teacher stopped by my office and asked if she could sit down with us on Monday because she was teaching the same unit and thought that her students would like to work collaboratively with the other class on the wiki.  Now the three of us have a shared Google notebook where we are brainstorming asynchronously and posting thoughts, ideas, and links.  I am starting to learn just enough to be dangerous so look out world…

It’s amazing how these things take on a life of their own when you get the right people involved.  Something has been set in motion that I never intended and we’re on an uncharted course that is new to all of us.

I’m posting partly because I’m excited about the possibilities and partly because I’m hoping some of you out there in cyberspace may have some tips, suggestions, or lessons learned from your own experiences.  I’ve done some Googling and seen some great examples of finished products (and works in process), but I’m hoping to gain some insight into how to actually begin the process with teachers and students.