Third graders at The Kincaid School in Texas are cultivating their learning in a community garden of global connectedness:

At my school the 3rd grade teachers have established a terrific blogging program for our 3rd graders. Not only do our students blog openly but they also visit and comment on other blogs. This year, a comment that a 3rd grader made on the blog of an author of a book his class was reading started a process that ended up with the author having a Skype call with the student’s 3rd grade class. [empasis added]

– Larry Kahn, http://plpnetwork.com/2011/12/21/meet-our-team-larry-kahn/

Bravo to these third grade teachers and their students for growing positive digital footprints among an authentic audience of beyond-school readers and thinkers. Such connectedness and the powerful learning that can come from such harvest are under-surface themes of @jgough’s latest post, “Integrated Studies: Gardening, Obesity, Open Source Learning.” Moreover, @whatedsaid placed the exclamation mark on the themes with her post, “What does it mean to be educated?”

Most students want to grow something meaningful by planting seeds, watering and fertilizing the sprouts, and sharing the harvest of their labors. As the students in Edna’s video proclaim – to be educated means to seize opportunities to make a positive difference in this world. We teachers should make sure that we are facilitating that “playing in the soil” at least as much as we are asking students to read from a recipe book. In my opinion, students should be doing the gardening and recipe creating much more than just following others’ recipes. Students deserve to be creators, not just consumers. In so doing, they just might learn better to feed themselves as lifelong gardeners and inventors…I mean learners – lifelong learners.