Field trip to Hawaii Public Radio

Yesterday the group of MPX 10s loaded onto a school bus and drove down to the Hawaii Public Radio station to deepen their understanding of our current topic: media literacy. Students met with the radio's director of public outreach Gene Evans, news reporter Bill Dorman, and sound technician Jason Taglianatti to hear about how public radio decides what makes it to the air.

When asked by students why the station doesn't cater more to the tastes of younger listeners (they have five shows which play exclusively classical music), Evans replied that younger listeners typically "don't have the chops or life experience to appreciate what we try to do here." He further explained that the radio believe "you gotta be challenged by the music and the news" suggesting it isn't the station's objective to play only things which are entertaining or pleasing to the ear.

 

Students asked questions about how the radio covers breaking news, whether radio has any advantages over tv, and how the decide which stories are newsworthy. See student blog posts about the field trip to read more about what they learned.

 

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Photo-essay of Alchemist

Last week was a productive one in MPX humanities. Students worked on their photo-essays which told the story of various moments from our summer reading book The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. Students printed and mounted their photos, which are now on display in the classroom. Additionally, they wrote essays which explained how their photos utilized the elements of photography such as angle, zoom, and the rule of thirds to evoke moments from the summer reading.

My highlight of this project was working with students to edit their first drafts of their written essays. They got feedback from a partner in the class as well as from me, and so far the final drafts have shown significant improvement from the first. Several students commented that it is important to them to be able to have time to produce a high quality final product and that the revision process enabled them to do that on this project.

Excited about project based learning

I got my first taste of the amazing feeling of enough time and enough teachers to do project based learning successfully on a big scale! All four MPX teachers teamed up to plan the thirsty games with the purpose of giving the incoming freshman the experience of a full project cycle. Teams were provided dirty water and had time and tools to brainstorm a way to clean the water with limited tools.

Three 9th grade students planning to capture the steam released when they put their dirty water on a hot plate.

 

 

See colleague Mark Hines' curriculum snapshot on it here.

 

 

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