Tech Ed-dy

It’s been a few days since the Authentic Global Collaboration Moodle Meet has ended and I finally have enough energy to consider writing down a few thoughts.  By all accounts the event was a real success.  We were able to attract interested participants from around the globe.  The participants were enthusiastic about the topics being discussed and were engaged in the forums for the full 6 days of the course.  We even managed to convince a few people to help us add content to the course wiki.

I plan on writing a few blog posts to try and process all the amazing discussions that went on, but for this post I want to unpack some of my thinking about the course structure, and reflect on how it did or didn’t work.  Whether I knew it or not a lot of the thinking that went into the course was influenced by my participation in the 11-3 Flat Classroom Teacher Certification course, and in particular the 7 C’s of Flattening a classroom: Connect, Communicate, Collaborate, Citizenship, Choices, Creation, Celebration.  So to help guide my thinking I will use this framework to structure my reflection (minus the Citizenship piece).

Connect

There were a number of times during the course where I caught myself thinking “Holy cow, how did I manage to get such great people into this Moodle to have such great conversations?”.   A number of the participants had registered for the course because it was  LearnNowBC course, but my anecdotal observation is that the majority of the really active participants found out about the course through some prior connection with me and my fellow facilitators.  Some of these connections included: Twitter conversations, Blog comments, the Flat Classroom Ning and Google Group and the the Classroom Connections Ning.  I have spent a number of years connecting via these platforms and trying to make a positive contribution to the conversations.  I can only guess here, but my suspicion is that because I was connected to certain people they were more apt to take me seriously and at least check out what the course was about.

I also connected with other educators that I knew personally or virtually that I thought might be interested in lending a hand.  The course would never have gotten off the ground if I hadn’t manage to put together a ‘dream team’ of exceptional educators to help make it happen.  Brad Ovenell-Carter (@braddo) helped me create the course; Claire Thompson (@clthompson) came on board as our Moodle and Distance Learning expert; Pauline Roberts (@pr05bps) was our super facilitator, who always had time to respond to participants and push their thinking further; Clint Surry (@clintsurry) also came on board as a facilitator and was instrumental in making participants feel welcome.

Communicate

At Claire’s suggestion I created a web page to advertise our course.  I’m not sure, but I have a suspicion that this might have helped us attract more participants as it gave them a landing place to find out all they needed to know.  By creating a landing page I also had a web address that I could send out over Twitter.  To make sure that I attracted the attention of educators interested in Global Collaboration I added hashtags to my Tweets that they might be monitoring.  Some of these included: #flatclass #ccglobal and #globaled.

I also took the time to create a short course teaser that outlined the topics we planned to cover.  My theory was that the teaser would do a much better job of communicating my excitement about the course and some of the ideas we hoped to explore,  By putting the teaser on You Tube I also made it easy for any one else to help me promote the course by embedding it in other websites

I was also thinking a lot about communication during the course.  I have participated in a number of Moodle Meets that had great resources but no real explanation about how I was supposed to access them.  In order to give participants some guidance I decided to create a daily overview video and upload it to You Tube.  These videos were very basic and included a quick video of my scruffy face before transitioning over to a screencast of the day’s offerings.  My theory was that having a face associated with the course would help create some consistency and help build community.

Choices

I struggled with this one a little.  I created the course assuming there would be a lot of participants new to global collaborative projects.  In order to make sure the course wasn’t too overwhelming I decided to include a series of Tasks for each day.  These included things like: joining our Wiki and adding content to certain pages, and uploading a photo to our course Flickr account.  I also seeded the discussions each day with questions that I thought would get the conversation started.  In general I think that this structure was successful in engaging the participants.  On reflection, however, I realise that by using the word ‘Task’ I was making it seem like a compulsory activity, when in my mind I considered everything in the course to be optional.  If I was to run this course again I would use the word ‘Option’ instead of ‘Task’ and pay close attention to the unintentional impact of the terms and structure I use.

This dilemma of mine was also one of the discussion topics that came up during the course: How to we balance the need for structure with the importance of choice in collaborative projects?

Creation

Early on Brad and I agreed that we wanted this course to be about more than information dissemination.  To this end we put a lot of energy into structuring each day around a guiding question and providing lots of opportunities for discussion.  We also decided to create a course wiki and see if we could get some participants to help create a newcomers guide to global collaborative projects.  I was quite pleased with the end result.  Not surprisingly the wiki pages that got the most attention were the ones structured around a task, but a fair amount of unstructured wiki work also took place.  I am unsure whether working on the wiki was beneficial for the course participants, but I am pleased that we have an artifact of the course that will remain online and possibly play a role in extending the conversations in the future.

Celebration

This is a tricky one  in a Moodle Meet where participants don’t meet face to face and are traditionally burned out by the end of the course.  Here are a couple of ways that we tried to promote celebration:

1. Every participant had chance to make a pledge to take one thing they learned from the course and actually try it.  This was Brad’s idea and I think it is brilliant.  On the final day we uploaded a pledge form to the Moodle that participants could download and fill out, then email to Brad.  In the pledge they could indicate when they would like the pledge to be emailed back to them so they can check how far along they are in fulfilling their promise to themselves.
2. On the final day I also asked the course participants to share what they had learned during the course in a Google Doc so that I could make a Wordle that reflected the learning from the week.  In general I don’t see a lot of value in Wordle as an education tools, but in this case I thought it might be a nice visual celebration of the week.  As it turns out it was asking too much, too late.  If I was to do this again I would try to set up an easy way for participants to share their learning as the course progressed, rather than trying to do it at the end.  Still, for those participants that made the effort I will post the course Wordle at the end of this post.

In hindsight there was another ‘C’ that was often front and center in my mind as I created the course: Community.  I wanted to create a sense that we were a community working toward finding answers together.  I think this has to be an important consideration when trying to connect people online, and as I reflect on this course I realise that building community is about the little things.  In the course we made sure that every participant that joined was greeted and that their questions were answered.  Every day there was a daily welcome and overview added to the course.  We created a Flickr account that participants could use to easily upload and share pictures.  We used a Google Map to indicate where everyone was from.  And as a result I think we were relatively successful at building community.

Note: these are my reflections on the amazing discussions going on in the Day 1 forums of an Authentic Global Collaboration Moodle Meet that I have organised.  I find Moodle discussion forums can facilitate amazing discussions, but that after a while I start to lose track of them all.  My plan is to blog my reflections and learning each day of the course and quote some of the discussions that caught my attention.  I will also link back to these discussions in the Moodle (if you want to see them you can register for the course here).

One of the discussion questions that I asked was “Are Global Collaborative Projects really worth the time and effort?”.  I asked this rather tongue in cheek, but thought that it was important to remind ourselves why it is worth taking on the extra challenge of trying to connect out students and the world.  Some of the responses took my breath away they were so passionate and honest.  I wanted to share a few of them here:

Yes!  Global (and all) collaboration is right on so many levels.  First, our students are growing up in a different world.  They will be competing for jobs with people from around the globe.  The more familiar they are with other cultures and people, the better off they will be.  Second, the ability to work well with others is consistently rated in the top 10 skills that employers want.  We must teach students how to talk AND listen, how to respect other’s views and values, and how to maximize the skills of others.  And the third, and best, in my opinion, reason that I LOVE Global Collaboration is that my students LOVE Global Collaboration.  Whatever project we are working on, my students will come in and ask, did I get an email? Are we working with Russia (China, Romania, Brazil etc.) today?  What is our topic, what are we doing?  An attentive student is a student who is learning. 

… most importantly I think is that the students taking part in these, as said by others, take ownership of their learning, of their global citizenship, of their web presence….they feel empowered, they feel listened to and respected..they are confident to have a voice and not be scared to share, right or wrong, they share and grow from it….they do not feel that the walls of their school, nor the borders of their city, province or country limit thinking and ideas…they become open to different approaches and cultural considerations.
They feel that their learning is alive…that it grows…that collaboration is one of the essential nutrients.

Another conversation in the Introductions forum really got me thinking.  Eddie DeBeer (http://www.insync21.com/) described an amazing project where Vancouver students “design and write curriculum, make and produce resources/materials, and send them off to Afghanistan.”  He then goes on to suggest that:

Clearly, real learning partnerships are possible; but, strangely, most often it seems that such collaboration happens best where “less” is the norm …

I replied, but the reply that I loved belongs to Pauline Roberts:

A teacher I worked with recently likened collaborative projects to making a jigsaw: each student is given an element of a task and they connect the pieces together to produce a complete picture. I had to disagree. This to me describes co-operation, not collaboration.
Collaboration is more like bread making. The individual ingredients are blended, kneaded and pummeled, flattened, stretched, rolled and ultimately transformed into something warm and nourishing that smells and tastes good. Unlike a jigsaw, the original ingredients are unrecognizable and cannot return to the way they were. In learning to collaborate effectively with my colleagues at BCS I have often felt pummeled, stretched, challenged and transformed into a better teacher and learner.
When we ask our students to collaborate they should feel the same way. They should be able to take their individual thoughts and ideas, stretch them , reshape them and synthesize them to produce creations of meaning and consequence. The process should transform them as learners and take them one step closer to becoming more effective collaborators.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.  There were lots of other conversations going on that I just wasn’t able to give the time I would have liked.  Hopefully some other participants will blog there reflections and we can share some of the great conversations we are having.

My 6 year old daughter and I made this Voice Thread today while visiting her Grandparents.  I got the idea of recording consecutive video into Voice Thread while watching this fantastic Advent Calendar Greeting from St. Augustine’s College in Sydney, Australia.  Until then I had mostly thought of Voice Thread as a way to combine static pictures and voice.  I think that being able to include video in a Voice Thread makes it a much more flexible and interesting product.

Even more exciting (in my opinion) is that the entire story was filmed using the Voice Thread App in my 2nd generation 8 GB iPod Touch.  I have been wanting to try this App for a while and when my daughter started to create a story with her pictures I jumped at the chance to try it out.  There is a lot to like about this App, for instance:

• Once you are logged into your Voice Thread account the App uploads the video you shoot directly to your account and bypasses the device hard drive.  When your iPod only has 8 GB of storage this is a big deal.
• The interface for the mobile App is really intuitive and easy to navigate.
• The App captures both video and audio really easily.  In my opinion this makes it an excellent way to gather evidence for e-portfolios.
• Once you are finished filming and the App has uploaded all the footage to your Voice Thread account it easy to access the ‘My Voice’ panel and re-arrange or delete the footage.  This makes it easy to delete mistakes or, even better, celebrate them by moving them to the end and calling them bloopers (don’t miss the outtakes in our little story )

My school has enjoyed watching the Advent Calendar greetings on the QR Code Advent Calendar.  Our contribution will be broadcast on December 17th, but I wanted to share it here as well.

Over the past few years I have had the pleasure of introducing a number of my teaching colleagues to Twitter.  Most recently @simoneasterman and @asangris have taken the plunge, and talking to them about their initial reactions has caused me to reflect a little on my own personal journey with social media.  I remember being in awe of the Twitter giants with thousands of followers and a seemingly infinite treasure chest of amazing resources to share.  I remember feeling overwhelmed by the amount of great stuff coming my way and feeling like I had to read it all because I might miss something important.  I remember the amazement when someone with lots of followers followed me back.  I certainly never felt like I had much to contribute to the conversation, but I was enjoying hoarding the riches being shared by everyone else.

Then I stumbled upon an amazing series of Moodle Meets called KnowSchools.  Before KnowSchools I had never participated in a Moodle Course before and the learning curve was quite steep.  It took me a while to feel comfortable with the multiple discussion threads and the self paced nature of these kinds of courses.   Sometimes I was able to complete the whole course and sometimes I was only able to drop in for a few of the modules, but whenever I participated I ended up in great conversations with other educators like me; educators that were just beginning to build their Personal Learning Network, that were still working out the kinks in their new blogs, and had less than 100 followers on Twitter.  In discussions with educators like Claire Thompson (@clthompson), Errin Gregory (@erringreg) and Cindy Martin (@cindyannemartin) I felt like I had something to contribute, that I had some of the answers and was starting to figure out what the questions were.  We were all wrestling with the same difficulties and as teachers in the same province in Canada we had a common frame of reference that made it easier to connect.

The discussions in the Moodle Courses ended up spilling over into comments on each others fledgling blog posts and Twitter @ replies.  And in hindsight I realise that this was a really important next stage in the development of my Personal Learning Network, they were my ‘nearly’ face to face network.  I had enough in common with them that I felt comfortable interacting with them online and contributing a little to the conversation.  I wasn’t just hoarding riches, I was also trying to add my 2 cents.

So, this all came full circle for me today as I was in an Elluminate session with both Claire and Cindy.  We were planning an upcoming Moodle Meet on Authentic Global Collaboration (more on that in another blog post).  I have never met either of them face to face but from our online interactions over the years I know that I can count on them and the skills that they bring to the course.  I am very excited about this upcoming Meet and think it has potential to be a really good one.  However, I realised  as I was washing dishes this evening and reflecting on our planning meeting that my real hope is that participants will end up connecting with like minded educators, and that connections will be built that will carry on after the course.  I am hoping that our course will help other educators start to build their ‘nearly’ face to face network.

I have been thinking about Global Collaborative Projects (GCPs) a lot lately.  This is partially because my students are involved in the Digiteen Project for the 4th year in a row.  It is also because I have signed up to help organise a Moodle Course in early January called Authentic Global Collaboration.  I volunteered in part because Global Collaboration  has become a bit of a buzz word these days and I wanted to take the time to try and unpack what GCPs are really all about and explore the different ways they can complement a classroom experience.  It seems to me that although we have the technology to make GCPs possible, and it is pretty clear that being able to collaborate globally is a skill that we should be teaching our students, it is not clear (at least to me) how a teacher is supposed to get started integrating GCPs into their curriculum in a meaningful way.

It occurred to me that I could start by trying to define what a Global Collaborative Project really is.  Certainly to be Global it needs to involve at least one other class that is at least a little distance away geographically.  To be Collaborative there must be some sort of information sharing.  And to be a Project is must adhere to some sort of inquiry framework and result in some sort of final product or products.  From there I started thinking about the wide range of projects that fall under the umbrella description of Global Collaborative Project, and realised pretty quickly that while they all fit the criteria for a GCP they were vastly different in Scope and Scale (these two particular elements were suggested by @braddo during a recent very productive Hangout).  Being a Math teacher I decided to plot some of the projects I was aware of using Scope and Scale as my two axis:

I find this graphic gives me some clarity.  I also see it as a useful launching off point for further discussions about what skills, technology, attitudes and aptitudes are necessary for GCPs to be successful.  I’m curious whether anyone else find this useful?  Does it help to think about GCPs using these 4 quadrants to differentiate between them somewhat?  And what are the different requirements of projects in each quadrant?

Here are links and/or descriptions for the projects I mention:

Life ‘Round Here (This project is over, but I always thought it was a great one.  Kim Cofino has a great description on her blog of how she helped two Grade 5 classes successfully participate in this project using the MYP Design Cycle).

Teddy Bears Around the World

Outside My Window (This is a ThinkQuest project only visible to schools that are members of the ThinkQuest Global Community.  The basic premise of the project is for schools to take pictures outside their windows at different times of the year and share them online)  A quick google search also found this interesting looking project.

Thin Walls Project (This is less of a project and more of an ongoing collaboration between two classrooms.  Thinking about this particular example makes me realise that Duration might also be an important element to consider.  The beauty of this kind of deep collaboration is that it can end up with students producing amazing products like The Field Guide to Molching)

Flat Classroom Projects (These are an amazing collection of ambitious projects that aim to involve many schools, in many countries and have a strong focus on teaching Digital Citizenship skills.)

On Friday I had the pleasure of being in the same building as David Warlick.  I was present for his CUEBC keynote and follow up unconference discussion.  He made some very interesting points.  He told great stories.  He made me think.  What follows is my attempt to mash up my notes from his keynote with my tweets from the unconference presentation and a couple other resources that I stumbled upon yesterday.  My hope is to find some transition points to guide me from his big ideas to practical applications in my classroom.

Introduction Notes

He started the keynote by sharing something that he had learned that day (can’t actually remember what that was) in order to illustrate that the the 21st Century Teacher must be a master learner.  They need to be comfortable saying “I don’t know – how do you think we could go about finding the answer to that question?”  In the unconference session someone made an interesting observation about how this was much easier for an experienced, confident teacher to do.  I think this is valid and raises the question: how should teacher training be structured so as to graduate teachers that are comfortable saying “I don’t know?”

He went on to state that “21st Century Education will be defined by it’s lack of limits.”  That we are now teaching in an information abundance and the interesting question is “What are the pedagogies of an information abundant learning environment?” An environment where there is no ceiling and where the environment empowers accomplishment.

For the rest of the keynote he unpacked what he thought were the main characteristics of “The Native Information Experience” with an eye to ‘hacking’ this experience for classroom use.

The Native Information Experience Is Responsive

He showed a great video of a children’s book that becomes interactive once an iPod Touch is inserted into it (I wish I could find it again Thanks to Casey the video is found and posted  here) an example of how today the experience responds to the student.  As a result the student can now develop a relationship with content.  The reason students are engaged by blogging is because it is responsive (if done properly).

He suggested that being connected to information is like part of the DNA of kids today.  They don’t say goodbye to their friends or stop a conversation because they carry them in their pockets; like alien tentacles reaching out.  When they enter the classroom we cut the tentacles off.

He also posed a couple thought provoking questions: How much time do we have to figure out how to channel curriculum through those tentacles?  Can learning really happen when anyone is this hyper-connected.

The Native Information Experience Is Fueled by Questions

Search Engines answer 150 million questions an hour.  Where did we go for answers Before Google?  We didn’t.  Google is turning us into an question asking culture.

He showed us an example of a teacher assignment where the students were given questions to guide them through the thinking experience (something I am guilty of doing); the teacher was trying to “question proof” the assignment so nothing was left out. He suggested that maybe what we should do is leave things out and have students question themselves into the content. (difficult with deadlines and curriculum)

In a web 2.0 conversation you are forced to ask questions about the answers that you find. Textbooks don’t encourage questions.

I liked this quote enough to tweet it out.  I think it holds some truth and is important.  Where it falls down in my classroom is that my students are trying to live in two worlds, the world of textbooks where you can believe everything written down and are tested on it, and the world of the internet which should encourage them to ask questions about validity, bias and the source of information, but more often than not is treated like a textbook.

The Native Information Experience Provokes Conversation

This characteristic follows from the quote above.

There was some time spent discussing situations where students wanted to learn grammar and writing skills because they came to realize that these would make them better communicators online and help them participate in conversations they found meaningful.

We also heard about Darren Kuropatwa’s use of blogs in his Math classroom.  At the start of the year each class starts out with a blank blog.  Each day one student is asked to put their notes on the blog and put the name of next note taker at bottom of the post.  The year starts out with the students just putting notes on the blog, but quickly becomes more interactive.  The students bring in outside resources; the note taker can mention in notes that they don’t get it and other students will fill in the gaps.

Students invest themselves in the experiences because it has value; it Inspires Personal Investment, another characteristic of the Native Information Experience.

During the unconference session I realised that most of my meaningful learning happens during conversations online as opposed to fact finding online.  We spend a lot of our time thinking about helping our students become better fact finders, but not much time thinking about the skills they need to become better at conversations.   I came across this blog post called Digital Literacies for Writing in Social Media that I thought had some good ideas for other skills/habits we should be considering.  I was also intrigued by something David Warlick said during the unconference session:

Teaching the new literacy skills is ‘easy’, but getting students to use these new skills habitually is hard.

So, I’m wondering how to get students to engage in learning conversations because they want to, not just because I am making them.

Finally, in children’s ‘Native  Information Experiences they succeed by getting it wrong.  As a result David Warlick suggested that in their Native Information Experience learning is Guided by Carefully Made Mistakes.

He asked the interesting questions “Can we be playful enough to give ourselves permission to get it wrong?” and “Can formal learning be more playful?”  He demonstrated a cool new search tool called Doodlebuzz that as far as I could tell had no practical application but was very cool and a good example of something that existed to satisfy our need to play.  The question he left us with was:

Might we allow some “distraction”.  Can we harness “distraction” for learning?

On Monday night I managed to carve out an hour in my life to attend the second #bced Twitter conversation on personalised learning.  For a really good summary of the main points covered I highly recommend reading @darcymullin’s blog post  Personalised Learning … my 2 cents.

I have tried to follow a few of these conversations in the past and usually come away with my brain whirling and a vague sense that something happened but I wasn’t really a part of it.  Monday night felt different.  For one thing I took a few minutes before the chat started to jot down a few of my thoughts in a google doc so that I didn’t have to struggle to compose them on the spot.  I also set up the #bced column of my Hootesuite client next to the mentions column and spent as much time monitoring messages sent directly to me as monitoring the general chat.

As a result I was less overwhelmed by the constant stream of seemingly unconnected information and more engaged in a few of the conversations going on.  This is a very interesting feature of these Twitter chats: everyone is contributing to one stream of information but having their own personal conversations at the same time.  As I was reviewing the chat log for the conversation I was amazed to see some topics and conversations that I had been completely unaware of.

As the chat progressed I also noticed that every once in a while someone would write a tweet that (to me anyway) really got to the heart of what some of the conversations were about.  These were gold as they were the nuggets I could favourite or re-tweet and in so doing improve the odds of going back and re-visiting that idea at some point in the future, and hopefully turn the idea into more concrete action.

It really amazes me how some people are able to craft these140 character thoughts that communicate a big idea using few words.  Twitter often gets a bad reputation as being full of fluff because 140 characters is not enough space to say something meaningful.  In my experience the opposite is true, when I know I only have 140 characters to communicate an idea I focus on trying to get to the essence of the idea.  I think this kind of summary writing is actually a form of higher order thinking and I am always in awe of the tweeps that seem to do this with ease.

I thought I would share a few of my favourite ‘nuggets’ from Monday night’s chat:

One of the conversations focused on finding the balance between giving students choice and also meeting the demands of our respective curriculums.  Choice is necessary for students to feel empowered but we can’t assume that they will always make the best choices (this blog post by @sbelezney explores this idea very convincingly) and we can’t ignore the curriculum.  I thought the tweets below summed up the tension between these two demands and the way we could be balancing them in our classrooms really well.

There was also a lot of chat about the incompatibility between grading and students taking control of their own learning.  It makes no sense to grade a student using extrinsic measures if the goal is to help them be intrinsically motivated.  I liked the tweet below because it’s about action: all teachers can change the way they grade and give feedback in their classrooms, even within the confines of the grading systems imposed on all of us.

My final takeaway from the conversation was that context is really important and that there is no one right way to move a classroom towards being more student centered.  Much depends on the grade you teach, the subject you teach, the students you teach (maybe not as much) and the kind of teacher you are.  I made a few general statements about how much difficulty students have learning from videos (based on my unstated context of teaching Math 7) and immediately heard from @okmbio about how great the flipped classroom model (based on watching videos at home) was.

After a few tweets back and forth I asked her what grade she taught and it turns out her context was AP Biology and I can see how older students and a more content oriented curriculum would be a good fit for the flipped classroom model.  I also made a mental note to myself to always check on context as without it we will always be talking in general terms and have difficulty turning our talk into action.

For the past 2 days I have been at a workshop about Inquiry in a Digital Environment hosted by Branksome Hall in Toronto.  One fascinating part of this workshop for me has been the involvement of facilitators from an organisation called The Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2) who have really helped push my thinking about how and what we should be teaching students.  The keynote presentations, smaller sessions and conversations over lunch and coffee have really got my head spinning and I am feeling the need to look for some trends and big ideas that I can use to move forward.   Otherwise I worry I will get stuck in the head whirling stage and not be able to apply what I have learned to my own practice.

There were 2 keynote presentations spread over 2 days.  The first one was given by Garfield Gini-Newman and the focus was on Critical Thinking and Inquiry.  The second was given by Dr. Roland Case and the focus was on Student Engagement.  The ideas below are mostly my own interpretation of their main ideas.

Big Idea #1: We should end debate about content vs skills and invite kids to engage in critical thought about the curriculum.

The model above illustrates the tools and conditions that TC2 considers to be important for Critical Thought or Critical Inquiry to take place.  They define Critical Thinking as: a complex activity, not a set of generic skils; concerned with judging or assessing what is reasonable or sensible in a situation; focuses on quality of reasoning (this is transferable); depends on the possession of relevant knowledge.

The piece of this model that I struggled with this week was the use of a tool callled “criteria for judgement”.  Garfield described this as “thinking in the face of criteria.  Inviting kids to make a judgement and giving them the tools to do it.”  I understand this to mean that we need to help students understand the conditions they need to satisfy in order to make a good decision.

Another important piece discussed was that Critical Thinking can only take place in a community that models and supports it.  And to nuture a community of thinkers it is important that teachers model thinking and support thinking.

Big Idea #2: The Activity Needs to be the Driver of Thinking

Garfield alluded to this early on in his keynote when he expressed concern with the idea of culminating activities.  His reasoning was that we approach these activities as the thing to do at the end of a unit after we have taught the content we think they need; we leave the interesting part until the end.  His suggestion is that this activity should come first and that the teacher should be a “knowledge broker” who helps students learn how to work with content in order to solve engaging problems.

Roland Case picked up this thread with a very compelling story about a student who went through school as an average student who was not very turned on by learning.  He eventually found his passion after travelling to Greece to participate in an Archeological Project.  This experience turned him into an avid Archaeologist.  However, when it was implied that this student liked History he vehemently denied liking History, instead he liked “finding out how people in the past lived”.  Regrettably, because he had been taught History as facts he had never internalised the bigger reason to be learning History.

In a Math workshop that I attended we also revisited this idea of starting with the activity and I was intrigued by the idea of picking problems with multiple points of entry so that all the learners in the classroom have a way to get started and a reason to want to learn more.  This combined with visual thinking routines and structures to facilitate peer to peer feedback seems to be a powerful combination for engaging students and differentiating instruction.

Big Idea #3: Technology should be a tool to support collaboration and inquiry

This is a big idea that is certainly not new to me, but I did like the Key Principles for using technology that TC2 have come up with; the ‘do’s’.  They suggest that technology in the classroom should:

1. enhance collaborative thinking
2. generate greater efficiency in use of instructional time
3. provide greater opportunities for differentiated learning through use of various modalities
4. provide an effective portal to digital content, thus allowing for use of less bounded resources
5. allow students to interact with the content in a meaningful way
6. encourage generative thinking that leads to new and novel ideas

They also suggested four ‘don’ts’ to keep in mind when supporting inquiry with technology:

• Don’t use technology just because it is there.
• Don’t substitute dazzle for engagement.
• Don’t confuse research with inquiry.
• Diminish student interaction.

Big Idea #4: We need to get students “caught up” in their learning.

Students in school are engaged, but the question is are they Educationally Engaged?  Roland Case defined this as “teachers and students being personally committed to pursuing the educational goals and to successfully performing their ongoing teaching and learning tasks.”  He unpacked the word engagement and made an interesting distinction between being:

• engaged but not educationally
• on task
• and educationally engaged

The question is “how do we get students “caught up”?  The following Five Levers for increasing student engagement were suggested.

Challenge: rich learning opportunities differentiated by ability and interest that invite freely dedicated student effort towards meaningful goal or outcome.  Some suggestions for doing this included:

• Reducing the demands of the most tedious assignments

• note form vs full sentences; paragraphs vs pages; orally/graphically vs in writing
• provide escape mechanisms to avoid the tedium (show me understanding and don’t have to do full deal)
• Provide more compelling learning activities
  • negotiate meaningful (intrinsic) targets
    • encourage students to prove things to themselves
    • set targets that they can meet
• Build in real life implications or consequences
  • essays become submissions
  • judgements lead to actions
• Problematize the subject matter to be learned
  • make critical inquiry the daily mode of learning.

Sell: build appreciation for the practical and amancipatory value of education

• teach with passion
• use examples and stories that resonate with their experiences and capture their imagination
• portray the merits of learning in ways the students can understand.
• selling at the micro level
  • explain why they need to know how to do it

Empower: provide robust, differentiated range of tools that students apply in self-regulated ways in increasingly self-directed situations.

• help students acquire ‘tools’ to think critically, creatively, and collaboratively.
• 5 kinds of tools
  • need to figure out task and the tools they will need to accomplish it.
• promote self-regulated us of tools.
• self-regulation (within goals choose how you will meet goals) is not the same as self-direction (choose the goals you want to achieve).

Inform: arrange for timely, helpful, and encouraging feedback on current level of achievement and on what might be required for further growth.

Nurture: support school and home atmospheres that encourage respectful, collaborative and caring behaviour by all.

So to recap.  My big take-aways from this workshop are:

1. We should end debate about content vs skills and invite kids to engage in critical thought about the curriculum.
2. The Activity Needs to be the Driver of Thinking
3. Technology should be a tool to support collaboration and inquiry
4. We need to get students “caught up” in their learning.

(cross post from Aspengrovetech.com)

This term my Grade 6 class worked really hard to investigate, design and create some excellent animated PowerPoint presentations on different inventions.  Our Guiding Question was “How can we communicate best?” and our Area of Interaction was Human Ingenuity

We used the ThinkQuest platform to help us stay on track.  This is a secure, private site but I have downloaded the project so anyone can have a look at the progression we followed.

Grade 6 PowerPoint ThinkQuest Project Pages

I was really impressed with the effort all my students put into their presentations and wanted to share a few of their stories:

Bullet Proof Glass – this student’s enthusiasm for his topic and delight at putting all the pieces together was exciting to watch.

Velcro – I was stunned by the amazing narrative story this student came up with to help convey her message.  Next year I am going to focus more on the storytelling aspect of this assignment.

Nail Polish – this presentation is visually stunning.  I can take no credit for her innate design sense.

Dubble Bubble – this presentation is notable in that it evolved an amazing amount as we progressed through the unit.  I am also proud of it as it includes a picture that we got official permission to use (a great teachable moment).

I am a little uncomfortable just highlighting a few of the presentations here as they were all amazing.  The entire collection can be found at www.aspengrovetech.com.