Thanks for your ideas, everyone. I appreciate it. Keep ‘em coming!

Here’s an entry I posted on the Women of the Web 2.0 site last night. Please feel free to give me your thoughts on this also.

My daughter gets credit for this idea (she’s pretty cool!)

What if we had a technology class just for girls? (Possible name for the class–GIFT: Girls in Fun Technology

So my questions are:
What would that class look like? What tools/skills would be taught? What kind of equipment/space would be needed? What grant money is out there that would help get such a program going?

I’d love to hear your input. If we could design the “ultimate” technology class, focusing on girls, what would it be?

Thanks for your ideas!

I just finished viewing the video for Chris Kaminski’s presentation for the K12 Online Conference. In it, he had students from his web design class speak their thoughts about education and technology. They had some very interesting things to say.

One thing stuck out in my mind, however. Where are the girls? Out of a dozen or students who spoke on his video, only one (the last one) was a girl.

Is that a trend in most high school technology classes (electives?) Is it just this particular class, or is there truly a gender imbalance in these classes? Our high school has a video class, and both of my children are in it. There are about 12-14 students, and my daughter is the only girl. I’m so glad that they have this class and that they are learning to film, edit video, and produce real-world products (filming games for our local cable channel, writing and producing a documentary on a former student, etc.) It’s an incredible opportunity, and as a parent, I’m thrilled that my daughter is taking it this year along with my son. But even she has made a comment on their class blog that there need to be more girls! What can we do to encourage that?

This is the third week the my English 3 class (11th grade) has been blogging. The first week they responded to a statistic and question and several responded to each other. In the process, Tate came up with a really cool comment. Last week they wrote a little longer entry tied into the literature we’d been reading. This week they wrote short essays responding to 3 prompts, again related to our literature.

After finishing his own great response, Grogan commented on another student’s post. I might add that the student he wrote to is in a different hour. That’s one of the cool benefits I’ve discovered about blogging with them—we’re no longer limited to a conversation just within our own class. Now students in different hours can comment and work together. Anyway, here’s Grogan’s comment to Ashley:

While her point of view differs entirely from my own, through her writing I have come to see the point of view of the settlers.

YES! That’s awesome. This is becoming a great DISCUSSION place for us. We can share our ideas, our thoughts, our opinions, and we have a terrific opportunity to debate, learn from each other, and add to the conversation with respect and in a safe environment. What we write has an effect on others. What we say matters. We learn to appreciate and understand other viewpoints. COOL!

I can’t wait to see how this continues to build and grow.