Invisible City     Location: Philadelphia, PA, Unitied States Name: The School of the Future

The School of the Future is a high school in West Philadelphia that opened in 2006 to fulfill a vision of a technology-empowered community where learning is continuous, relevant, and adaptive.

The integrated, project-based curriculum emphasizes as the development of skills such as leadership and systems thinking, and incorporates experiential learning in the local community as well as technology-enabled learning as a means of accessing a global community.

Prior to the school’s opening, the first group of incoming ninth graders used TIGed to meet online and begin developing digital literacies that are now essential in the school’s technology rich learning environment. They created online profiles as a means of exploring issues of identity, and used communication tools, such as TIG messages and blogs, to respond to one another’s ideas and become comfortable with this online learning. Students’ sense of a world outside of Philadelphia broadened as they made global connections by reading Member Stories or receiving feedback on their blogs from active TIG members around the world. During the school year, student projects have continued to explore themes of identity, making local connections to global issues.

As participants in the 2006 United Nations Conference on Human Rights and Migration, students attended a preparatory conference to begin exploring the human rights issues around global migration. They researched the issues on TakingITGlobal.org, reading articles in Panorama written by other youth leaders around the world, and used blogs to synthesize this new information and build their collective knowledge. Learners then collaborated with students from other Philadelphia high schools to draft a plan of action in response to these issues, and later blogged to reflect on the experience of participating in their first student conference. The students chosen to represent the School of the Future participated in a weekly seminar to discuss the issues and prepare a final plan of action, using a TIGed virtual classroom to share documents, blog about ideas, and discuss viewpoints between weekly meetings. The conference itself was webcast around the world, bringing students together from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Bahrain, the UK, and around the US to discuss human rights as a global issue. This collaborative effort to identify solutions to global human rights challenges engaged students’ problem solving and critical thinking skills..

A digital media project titled “Invisible City” used photography to bring the global issues explored during the UN Conference to a local level at home in Philadelphia. Under the guidance of digital arts and media educator, Louis Mazza, students produced multimedia pieces that explored the relationship between borders and identity. The project culminated with two students showcasing the group’s digital media portfolio, including photographs and original music podcasts, at the 2007 Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference.

Read about the project from Eric, one learners that attended the conference:
http://sof-ericw.tigblog.org/

Best Practice:
Meet students where they are – their use of technology is predominantly social, so emphasize the social aspects of project based learning, such as communication and collaboration.