I just participated in another wonderful Elluminate session – part of a series titled ‘It takes a Village – learning cultures, paradigms and spaces”
Today’s presenter was Steve Collis (Twitter ID @steve_collis) from Northern Beaches Christian School, in Terrey Hills, Sydney, Australia.   I apologise if I paraphrase incorrectly.

Steve believes that the learning spaces in schools should invite students to be creative and speak out.  The teacher’s role is as facilitator in the de-regulated space.  After showing us his amazing new learning space he asked us to consider classrooms in a different light –   What if your classroom was a stage ?

My first thought was – “If it was a stage – we can be whoever we want to be”
Others contributed :
CW: “If a stage, students are expected to improve, not just do their best job the first time…they practice and practice until they get it right and are ready for the “performance””
GM: “There should be a sense of expectation, excitement, anticipation”
I loved this analogy – Steve believes that classrooms need disrupting. He talked about how the use of Virtual spaces (online learning and publishing) can disrupt the real space.
I think this is the key to the people who say that they can’t alter their teaching while they are restrained by the old-fashioned classroom buildings, which are the reality for many of us. Even if we are not all blessed with the infrastructure of NBCS, we can make inroads into change that open the doors to the world outside. The opportunities are enormous –from simple publishing poems on-line to tweeting and skyping and much more complicated on-line projects.
In the chat conversation, I asked how to gain an audience for children’s work and it was mentioned that if only 3 people read a poem published on a blog it was probably one or two more than would have read the poem if it sat in an exercise book in the classroom.  So true – and imagine the strength of the experience when that child knows that someone else read their work and liked it.
I look forward to the rest of this series –‘ It takes a village’ and thank Helen Otway the organiser.