Last spring, students in Ms. Thormahlen’s English 9 Honors class began piloting My Big Campus, a new online learning environment, to engage in discussions about English related topics. This style of learning is a first for our school district, but is a growing trend regionally and nationally. My Big Campus was the tool of choice because not only does it offer our teachers and students a well designed virtual space to interact outside the classroom but it is also integrated into the schools' Internet filtering and grading systems making it safe and easy to manage. Upon learning about the software and preparing to use it with her students, Ms. Brooke Thormahlen (pictured below working with some of her students) immediately saw the benefits of using My Big Campus due to the fact that it was so much like Facebook, something that her students were already comfortable using socially and recreationally outside of school. “My Big Campus is similar to having a Facebook page just for my classroom. I can post a link or a discussion topic and my students can comment on it. I like that they are using a format that they already enjoy, but their comments are focused on the content we are working on in the classroom,” Thormahlen said. For their pilot exercise using the new system, students first read Shakespeare’s prologue and Act I from Romeo and Juliet and then began a typical class discussion on how Shakespeare builds tension and suspense in the first scenes of the play. After class, students were then instructed to use My Big Campus to access a video clip that Ms. Thormahlen had posted from West Side Story. Students watched the prologue from the famous musical and were asked to comment on how Jerome Robbins builds tension and suspense through his choreography. This allowed them to draw comparisons and further perspective on Romeo and Juliet. By posting their comments on My Big Campus, students could share their thoughts as well as see and comment on the thoughts posted by their peers as the discussion topic evolved. While the students’ posts were visible to other students in the class, they were not visible to people outside the class group. This allowed for a sense of community as well as providing a space for all students to share information. Ms. Thormahlen commented, “One of the inherent benefits of using My Big Campus is that students who rarely raise their hands in the classroom feel confident expressing themselves. I like that I can ‘hear’ the voices of all of my students, not just the ones who participate verbally in a typical classroom discussion.” This year, Ms. Thormahlen plans to address a semester long theme of “Choice is Powerful” using My Big Campus. Students will then create individual blogs (another feature of the system) and respond to the power of choice as it is shown in the assigned literature, and engage in both formal and informal discussions about literature. In addition, students will be able to post videos and comments on connections that they find that enhance the literature they are discussing in class. Thormahlen is excited because she sees blogging as another way for her students to get a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the content. The goal is to have students compile many blog entries that will become a tool used for reflection at the end of the semester. In the short time it has already been used, My Big Campus offers much potential to the students in Ms. Thormahlen's classes and it potentially can have a positive impact across the rest of the school district too. If you have a need or desire to engage your students in using My Big Campus for online learning in your classroom, feel free learn about it in a workshop early next month or contact the Tech Department today to help them get started using the system, just as the 9th graders at Perry Jr. High have and will continue to do this year.