Tech Ed-dy

I am currently following a great LearnNowBC course on Project Based Learning.  A forum thread on Math and PBL got me thinking so I left a long, rambling post on the forum.  I wanted to remember the post and the links shared so I thought I would re-post it here:

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This is where I struggle with math and projects. The way I teach math at the moment is quite linear. My students need to understand skill A before they can really get skill B, and they need constant feedback from me as they struggle with concepts so that they don’t develop misconceptions. This builds their confidence and their willingness to push themselves further. Projects in my experience tend to be more organic and require very careful scaffolding to make sure the students learn what I need them to learn. To be honest part of the reason I don’t do more projects in Math class is that the planning involved in pulling off a project that allows for student choice as well as careful scaffolding of concepts is a bit overwhelming. I have however managed one project that I think pulls this off: http://macoun.edublogs.org/2011/04/27/hockey-math/

A few other random thoughts I wanted to share:

I think that in Math class (and maybe in other classes as well) PBL needs to be built on a firm foundation of progressive pedagogy. Over the past couple of years I have been working on changing my grading practices (http://macoun.edublogs.org/2011/05/15/confessions-of-a-reformed-grader/) and trying to think of my curriculum in a less linear fashion. The next step I feel is to try and plan out my year as a series of projects and map learning outcomes to these projects.

In some ways I feel that Dan Meyer’s 3 acts approach to Math problems might be a good model to adopt when trying PBL in the math classroom in that Act 1 hooks the students in, Act 2 allows us to actually teach them what they need to know and then Act 3 allows them to apply their learning (At least I think that’s his approach).

I also wanted to mention that the Critical Thinking Consortium has a really interesting approach to Inquiry in the Math class that I think is very applicable to PBL. I blog about it here: http://macoun.edublogs.org/2011/06/29/thoughts-on-critical-inquiry-from-ide2011/ but the key piece I came away with was the importance of picking tasks that have a low level of entry (so everyone in the class can get started) but have a high ceiling so that students can go into as much depth and complexity as they are able.

For the most part I think what I have really been talking about here is Problem Based Learning which I think is maybe the easier fit in a Math classroom. It has occurred to me that Project Based Learning might work if the focus of the Project is to learn and communicate what you are learning. Eric Marcos’s Math Train TV comes to mind as a good example.

Finally I thought I would mention that the Math Project Journal is a great resource for teachers looking for engaging math projects to try in Middle and High School classes.

I find social media to be so incredibly powerful. A couple examples from earlier this week.

1. One of my students couldn’t find any creative commons licensed pictures of safety pin jewelry for a presentation she was making. She did find some on a blog that were all rights reserved. I noticed that the blog owner had a twitter account and so my student and I sent them a quick message on Twitter asking for permission to use the photos. I got a reply about a half hour later. Cool. (unfortunately we still have some work to do tracking down permissions, but I was still impressed at how quickly social media let me and my student connect and get questions answered quickly).
2. A chance glance at my twitter feed turned up a tweet suggesting that Mitch Resnick was presenting on the new web based SCRATCH interface. I am very interested in this new iteration of SCRATCH and am intrigued by its potential as a collaboration platform, but I have not been able to figure out when it will be released. So I replied to the tweet asking if he had mentioned a roll out date and was told it would get asked during the Q+A. How cool. I was able to indirectly ask my question to Mitch Resnick himself.

When I have days like this where I feel the world is at my fingertips to think that everyone needs to know how to connect in this way. I am still trying to figure out if there is any truth in that statement.

I recently spent an hour talking to a Grade 4 class about Social Media. This is the youngest grade that I have had these conversations with and I was pleasantly surprised by their enthusiasm for the topic and willingness to consider my message. As usual I prepared a slide deck and made some notes about general themes I wanted to touch on, and then made it up as I went along. The class was looking at Social Media through the bigger lens of Mass Media and as I talked I felt like I was making some interesting connections (at least to me) that were worth sharing.

Initially I was at a loss as to how to structure my presentation and as a last resort I re-watched ‘Did You Know 4.0‘. I didn’t have any intention of showing this video to the class as I figured it was too fast and most of the important points would go over the student’s heads. But as I watched I was struck by how good some of the visuals were and found myself thinking “If only I could just show them some of this ..”, and then I realised I could. Using my favourite screenshot tool I went through the video and made screenshots of all the visuals I liked. I then imported them into PowerPoint and started to think about what I wanted to say. At that point I realised that the order of information in the video wasn’t a structure I could use, so switching to slide view I rearranged the slides and voila, had a version of ‘Did You Know 4.0′ that worked for me. As it turns out the ‘Did You Know’ video had three really useful messages that I hadn’t really picked up on before. The first one was:‘A surge of new technologies and social media innovations is altering the media landscape.‘To reinforce how much technology has changed I showed them this visual, which is actually from the end of the original movie.

As a lot of grade 4 students at my school have iPods they all have these powerful computers in their pockets. I felt like it made them sit up and take notice when I started talking about the power they had in their possession. I found myself explaining to them that this was part of the reason Social Media is so important these days, because everyone can access it and contribute to it using these powerful devices.We talked about the difference between regular media where only journalists get to be the ones that publish, and social media where anyone can publish. We discussed the pros and cons of having access to information that hasn’t been filtered through an editor. I am constantly amazed at how many students think they just ‘know’ when something online is not real. I tried to explain to them that this all depends on them having enough background knowledge to make a judgement regarding truthfulness, but felt like my explanation was falling on deaf ears (something to ponder for next time).

With the next slides I wanted them to understand how social media innovations were making life difficult for traditional media. I started with a series of slides showing the decline of newspaper readership and the increase in online reading, followed by this slide showing how advertising has changed.

I found myself explaining to them the significance to advertisors of being able to track how many clicks their ads get and who clicks on them. I included a brief explanation of targeted advertising and how companies like Facebook and Google track their online behaviours so they can send them ads they are interested in. They seemed interested but I will have to reflect on whether this was an appropriate message for their age as most of them were not yet on social networks and not a position to purchase online.

The next message I took from the “Did You Know” video was: it’s easier than ever to reach a large audience but harder than ever to really connect with it. An hour or so before my session I sent out a Twitter request for messages to the grade 4 class and had a few replies that I shared while explaining how I use Social Media. I think, however, that I had a bigger impact when I showed them this slide:

Followed by this slide:

(And here is where this blog post is going to end. I am afraid that any chance of it getting wrapped up in a neat way has become hijacked by my attempts to blog from my new ipad using the Blogsy app.)

A thinking out loud post that is cross posted from my Flat Classroom Teacher Blog.

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OK, I admit.  I was doing great with the Flat Classroom Teacher assignments until I had to start aligning my project to standards (Challenge #11).  This is the part I don’t like very much. Part of the problem has been the lack of a good project idea.  My initial thought was to use past projects to satisfy the requirements of this course, but to be honest, that’s just boring.  So, here is my new (not boring, but possibly very complicated) project idea: Kids 4 Kiva.

I’m already having second thoughts about the name as I think it through, but as I have already started the wiki I think I will stick with it for now.  This project is really just an excuse to somehow use Kiva in my classroom.  There is so much good stuff on Kiva that I feel compelled to try and design a project around it.  The obvious focus of the project is to have students raise money and decide who to lend money to.  The problem is that I am having a hard time figuring out how that can fit into any curricula that I teach.  So I have decided that my Math 7 class is going to figure out how to raise the most money from a bake sale, and we’ll use Kiva to figure out where the money should go.  This means that my Math class is going to have to decide on the following:

• The most cost effective bake sale recipes.  To do this they will have to discover the cost of each ingredient and the actual cost to make each bake sale item.  I can imagine some fun times looking at recipes and some good math activities around fractions and ratios.  There will also have to be a field trip to the local grocery store to find out prices and amounts.
• What kinds of bake sale items sell the best.  This might have to take the form of a survey etc.
• How much to charge for each item and how many of each item to make.

Once the money is raised the students will have to decide who to give it too.  I can imagine this taking place in a Socials Class where teams of students have to make a case for why a particular Kiva recipient is the best person to give the loan to (there would have to be some pretty clear criteria for this so that it is more about loan viability and greatest impact, not a popularity contest).

My thinking is that this could be a really neat global Math project if set up properly.  Students from each country could share their recipes and the cost of different items on Wiki pages.  This could also include pictures from the grocery store trips.  This might lead to some interesting observations about different prices in different countries.  It might also be interesting if each school took on making an item using a recipe from a different country.

It would also be interesting if students could share the calculations they do to figure out the per item cost of their bake sale items.  Trying to figure out how other students calculate and communicate mathematically would be a really good exercise.

I’m not sure how to get students working in virtual teams as the actual bake sales will happen in each individual country, but I will keep thinking on this (see comments).

So, on to the NETS.

1. Creativity and Innovation.  I think this project could satisfy the following sub-criteria:

• Identify trends and forecast probabilities.  This is what they would have to do in the process of deciding what to make and how much to make.

2. Communication and Collaboration.  The wiki work would allow students to:

• Communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats
• Develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures

4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making.

• I think this standard is what this project is really all about:  it’s an authentic problem; students have to plan and manage activities to develop a solution; and they have to collect and analyse data to make informed decisions.

Hmm, by trying to align this project to the NETS I realise that a lot of the digital literacy standards might be hard to meet.  One way to meet more of them would be to set up a Wiki template that each group used to communicate their research and decisions.

It might also be fun if each group had to create a promo video for their choice of bake sale item and the video could go on their wiki page.

Friday was the first ever common pro-d day for all ISABC schools.  Teachers from different (and sometimes competing) Independent Schools in British Columbia all met at two different venues for an exciting day of learning and sharing.  Twitter was leveraged as a back channel tool, and notes and resources were shared via public Google Docs.  It was a good day.

I spent the morning in a session with David Wees that made me thinks differently about some of the assumptions I have been making as a math teacher.  The session title was Teaching Math via Computer Programming.  David’s basic premise  was influenced by the the work of Conrad Wolfram who claims that cranking numbers doesn’t do anything at all, but that programming teaches understanding.

We started by looking at algorithmic thinking and did an activity many computer science students have done before.  We drew a shape and then tried to write instructions so that someone else could re-draw the shape.  This process really showed the assumptions involved in giving or describing instructions.  I found myself thinking that this would be a good way to get my Math 7 students to reflect on how they communicate their work.  In my class I find that my students fall into two camps when it comes to showing work: they either don’t want to show much of their thinking at all, or they spend too much time writing long descriptive paragraphs and run out of time to do the math.  I suspect that part of the problem is that they don’t fully understand why they have to communicate their work, and how to do it in a logical way, and that a focus on algorithmic thinking activities at the start of the year might help.

We programmed Logo the Turtle to draw different geometric shapes.  I loved this activity.  Instead of ‘teaching’ students the properties of different shapes, the process of writing a simple program to draw them forces students to explore and experiment with these properties.  I might try this activity later this year.

We also struggled to figure out what function had been X’d out in the simple program below:

While I probably wouldn’t give this one to my Math 7 students I did appreciate the way it forced me to use a lot of different problem solving methods and really think about numbers.  As David said (quoting Dr. Gordon Hamilton) ”the heart of mathematics is problem solving”.

My big take away from this session was the result of a discussion at the end of the workshop.  It was a discussion I have heard many times before but this time a few things became more clear in my head.  The gyst of the discussion was the tension between using technology to do calculations and the need to students to do the calculations themselves in order to really understand them.  Currently I am a teacher that only lets students use calculators sparingly.  I find that as soon as I let my students use calculators they stop thinking for themselves as much, and are reluctant to question the answer the calculator spits out.  So my approach has always been to stick with paper and pencil and ‘showing your work’ so that if the answer is wrong I can help students unpack the thinking that led them there.

What I realised during the discussion, however, was that I am assuming that the process of doing math calculations by hand is the best way to instill number sense into my students.  The honest truth is that a lot of them are tempted to learn a paper based algorithm for finding the right answer and then try to replicate the algorithm without actually thinking about what they are doing.  They have to do a lot more thinking when I ask them to estimate an answer, because there is no one right way to estimate and they have to think and apply their knowledge in order to do it.  I do teach estimation, and in my class we do a lot of modeling and problem solving, and I have had a certain amount of success improving my student’s number sense.  However, I always do this in a context that assumes being able to do hand calculations trumps all.  Now I am wondering what my classroom mught look like if I let students use calculators for the basic calculations and really focused on estimation, modelling and problem solving the rest of the time.  As David said “Using technology to do the calculations lets us use more of our brain to do the Big Math.

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.