We're sending the groups out with video and digital cameras to grab images and interview people in their community about a particular theme. Then they come back and scan the material into a composition space we've created on the Web where you can begin to look at the patterns that emerge in those images. In the composition space, students and teachers explore the material and make connections. They may create linear meaning of what they've experienced with annotations of images or audio. Or perhaps they create a juxtaposition between two startling images, or a slide show of images.
Kids also create branches to one another's essays about the same neighborhood.
So they are beginning to see connections, and they are beginning to see their own peers and their community as resources. It's about grounding inquiry in the multiple sources of knowledge within their own experience and communities, rather than just relying on the official sources of information. Sometimes it's not clear which one is right and which one is wrong, and that can lead to an interesting discussion. But essentially that's the model. The kind of connection that Bill is talking about leads toward a different image of the classroom.