What we’ve been up to this fall semester!

This fall my Writing 340 class undertook the task of expanding SOS Classroom into the realm of music education, an area heavily hit by budget cuts. With an outstanding number of musicians in our class, we believed we could gather a wide breath of online music education resources to begin to fill in the curriculum void in the LAUSD K-8 classrooms.
We focused the topics of rhythm, aural skills and voice, music history, musicians and composers, and music genres and lyrics. We envisioned that these areas would help cultivate artistic perception, creative expression and understanding of the historical and cultural context of music. The ultimate goal of SOS Classroom Music, aside from education, is to cultivate a long-lasting musical interest in youths.

After weeks of bookmarking relevant sites, our class had to determine a user-friendly and age-appropriate presentation of the collected information. Our discussions on how to integrate and present the various project elements brought up many interesting questions surrounding cultural and interface bias.

The area of music history incited engaging conversation as concerns were voiced about appropriate methods of illustration, including questions about the validity and comprehensiveness of our aggregated information. Coach got the class thinking about the reflections of our socioeconomic and cultural bias in the information we collected, as the history of music is so intricately interwoven with cross-cultural and longitudinal influence spanning countries and continents.

Furthermore, interface concerns were raised about the presentation of information. What information would be highlighted and how would we create connections between all the different elements? What connections would we make to Classical composer Mozart and how would we present the history of influence? Where would the instruments and respective histories be placed in relation? The complex chronology of music and its multitude of influences posed a substantial question on both the cultural perspective as well as chronological presentation of all the information we gathered.

The interesting class discussions sparked by these basic logistical concerns not only reflects a larger contextual question our class must face, but also a question our country’s education system must consider in the education reform debate.

To coincide with the traditional start of summer school, SOS Classroom is launching its resource site. Now you will find the first set of life preservers, resources gathered and organized according to grade level and subject.

We will also be beginning our pilot program at the Champions summer camp in Hancock Park. The campers will be using our resources and providing feedback on which ones are most worthwhile.

We are joining the online movement to use Web tools to help our ailing schools. We solute the work of AngelMom, Victoria Hurley, 4LAKids, Jose Rodriguez, and Cuts Hurt Kids who are all voicing their discontent and trying to raise awareness.

Our next mission is to get word of the site out to as many students, parents, and teachers as possible. At the same time, we will be continuing to build and to organize our resource lists, so keep the tags coming!

Save our Summer: the SOS Project 2009
Coming July 6, 2009

The SOS Classroom

With summer school canceled in LAUSD and elsewhere for K-8 students, parents, teachers and students are banding together to Save Our Summer School by using Web 2.0 technology to get resources to the kids who need them most.

Problem: Despite all the talk of the crumbling U.S. educational system, LAUSD has canceled summer school (completely for elementary and Middle school), after years of scaling it back from 6 weeks to 4 weeks. Not only does this create an additional burden on families, this decision will also mean even more students who are not performing at grade level, presenting an even greater strain on our public schools.

Solution:

Use Web 2.0 tools to collect, organize, and redistribute free online educational resources for the students and families to use.

Background: This is the age of Web 2.0. The era of crowdsourcing. A time when Wikipedias are built by the world wide web users (and a few hundred dedicated volunteer editors). At the same time, the Internet is overflowing with educational content. However, this content is like the supply closet in the overcrowded school: disorganized, inaccessible, impossible to navigate effectively. What if we could navigate. Better yet, what if we could begin to tag resources for the appropriate learning level and present those to students, teachers and families in one location. Better still, what if we could do this without creating another bureaucracy, but instead draw upon the democracy of the Internet.

Proposal:

* Crowdsource the tagging of resources
* Host on Free online aggregation site
* Offer some tools for dialogue.

To play:

• Find a resource and tag it: sosclassroom
• send the resource to sosclassroom[at]gmail.com
• tweet us @sosclassroom or #sosclassroom

Note: This proposal is not meant to replace summer school or to justify its removal. These are not credit-baring activities. This project is meant to provide easily accessible and well-organized curriculum to students, parents, and teachers to help ease some of the hardship of the cancellation of this program.

Who we are: An interested group of educators and students. The core members of the SOS Project team are working in a service learning project in a USC upper division writing course that emphasizes networked writing technology. But we are also the crowdsourced, networked volunteer educators. We are parents, teachers, and students trying to Save Our Summers.

Roll Out Beta Version: July 6