I have spent time building my Wiki over the course of this summer. I see this as a concrete place to communicate about curriculum and materials with students. While I can change and update my teaching, it can be a solid point of focus that carries on from year to year.
I have also created blogs for each of my classes. I intend to use these blogs for personal reflection and discussion with students. I see this as achieving the NETS standard, Model Digital-Age Work and Learning. I use a personal blog to discuss my experiences with racing, etc. But, I intend to use my class blogs to reflect on student achievement and effort on assignments, as well as what works and what doesn't. I think reflecting on my teaching is an important model for students, to show them that in the "real world" people need to evaluate the job that they are doing. After all, I intend for students to reflect on their learning using their personal blogs.
I also intend to model an assignment for Environmental Science on my personal blog. I was inspired while completing my first solo ascent of a 13er. I did some Google Earth research on the map, before starting my journey, and I virtually hiked the trial before my trip. I took a few pictures of the most beautiful moments, and figured that I would blog about it...since that fits into the scope of my personal blog. On the descent, I thought that would be a great Environmental Science project, after introducing John Muir's vision of the Forest Service. I figured that I would record my virtual hike on Google Earth, posting that to my blog with a description of my experience, including pictures of moments of beauty. I intend to show this entry to my students, and have them complete the same assignment...creating a virtual hike or field trip for others. This, hopefully, can become a quad blogging project, thus being shared with people in other parts of the globe. This, to me, is a genuine example of modeling digital-age work and learning.
I totally agree that creating things as teachers is the best way to model digital work and learning. I try to always do the same project that I assign my students so that they have an example of what to do (I think this is far more informative than a rubric) and just to give them ideas about how to execute a project. Projects with a general structure (like your 13er) project are great because students have an outline of what to do and are clear about expectations. I also appreciate the uniformity that comes along with projects that have consistent structures (like your 13er example) and the variety is just in the individual experiences that are documented. Cool!
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