What I enjoy most about Clarence Fisher is that he’s real.  His classroom is real.  His students are real.  His successes are real and his failures are real.  Clarence’s blog Remote Access is testimony to that realness.

I like the way his classroom pulls all the information together.  Our second f2f session today (our first full day though) began with this video put together by Wendy Drexler’s high school students as they made sense of “The Networked Student”  just before Clarence skyped in to talk to us.

Part of the conversation after watching the video talked about how can you pull information? How do you find the time to do it?  How do you check out the information?  I think Clarence did a great job in answering those questions for people even though he was unaware of the discussion prior to skyping in.

Clarence described his students as “hubs”.  Sometimes we teachers miss valuable pieces like that.  Sometimes we don’t know enough about the networks in our classrooms.  He spoke of a group of middle-school girls in his classroom who are a “hub” – they are networked – to each other.  They sit together, they work together, they produce things together, they help one another, they support one another.  Then he spoke of another “hub” of networked students – some boys.  The difference between the two “hubs” was their network extend 3600kms outside the classroom!  Neither group is any less connected/networked.  The teacher is still a “hub” be it in a different way.  The teacher is still in charge of the learning goal.

Clarence relies heavily on RSS feeds into the classroom.  He teaches his students about the power of RSS.  He teaches his students how to pull feeds from blogs around the world, he teaches his students how to make information come to them and by doing so, he encourages them to talk about what they are learning and uses it to help his students have a voice out in the world.  And they do.  He’s shown his students the power of their voices and how to express the things that they really care about.  He’s shown them how they can have a voice.

That’s powerful stuff.  That’s real stuff.  That’s how we can spread our ideas more powerfully. Thanks for talking to us Clarence! Hope that glass of wine was nice!