Web Publishing Requires Some Humility...

Naked before the world...

I taught myself another lesson, today.  I've been warning the Functions students for almost a week now that they were going to have a project coming up instead of another quiz over material from chapter 3, about transforming functions.  I also told them that they were going to do most of their work online, and submit their project to me via the class facebook wall, or via email to be posted by myself.

Some students seemed interested with the prospect, but I had a couple of students who were very resistant to putting their work out there for everyone to see.

"But Mr. Baker, I don't want to everyone to see my grade."
"What if I don't do very well? Everyone will know!" 

My response to them was one that I adhere to myself before posting things on here or sharing things on Twitter of facebook.

If you're worried about what other people will think about the work you've done, then make sure that you submit work that you know you are proud of.  There's nothing to be ashamed of if there's nothing in your work to carry shame about.

With that in mind, I shared a recent group project from my "Learning with the Internet" class last night on the Twitter hashtag #edtech, and even had someone retweet it to pass our wiki on.  I felt pretty good.  The first bookmark is our work.  While checking the class discussion board this morning, I found out that another group had also done their project on Diigo.com!  The second bookmark is the other group's work.

• islt9440 - Group 7: Diigo for Education - About diigo.com
  My group for my grad class, "Learning with the Internet" created this wiki about using and implementing Diigo in the classroom.
  tags: diigo collaboration bookmarking lesson plans educator
   
• Student Learning with Diigo
  One of the groups in my grad class, "Learning with the Internet" created this apge.
  tags: diigo collaboration bookmarking lesson plans educator
  
  Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

So, what's the lesson, here?  Well, first of all, there was a nice lesson in humility.  :)  But moreso, I'd say that the same thing I told my students about their future project holds true for myself.  I felt confident turning in that wiki for our group work.  I knew I had created a well thought out sample lesson, was proud of the way I had initiated our group's norms for communication on the wiki, and thought we had a good amount of knowledge on the site for a curious teacher to happen upon.

At first I was just stricken with panic over how much more professional in appearance group 8's Google site was.  After the fear subsided, however, I was able to appreciate how well thought-out the page was and was able to escape envy and shame.  I congratulated the group on a job well done.