Tech Ed-dy

The Holidays have left me with about four half thought out blog posts and I can’t seem to get myself into the right headspace to finish them off.  I think maybe I’m taking them too seriously, so instead I think it’s time for more of a stream of consciousness post.

I just finished reading Will Richardson’s heads up regarding his Educon 2.1 presentation (oh, how I wish I could go) entitled “What will classroom learning look like?”.  He has collected some great resources on this topic in a google notebook page and asks for the participants in his discussion to peruse them beforehand.  His actual presentation is going to be more of a facilitated group discussion.  What a great idea.  With google notebook it is easy to collect a series of clippings and links on any topic and publish them immediately.  Why aren’t we using this more in the classroom as a way to front load student knowledge before they come to class?

Will’s notebook page led me to a blog post by Mark Pesce called Fluid Learning.  It is a long post and I can’t claim to have read the entire piece but what I came away with was that sites like  ratemyprofessors.com are putting more and more control in the hands of students and leaving less control in the hands of the institutions.  The quotable piece that stuck with me was:

The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control
anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.

I believe this.  But I’m not sure this is the best message to use to try and empower overworked and unconvinced teachers to try using more technology in their classrooms.

Recently I signed my grade 8 technology class to be a Sounding Board for the Flat Classroom Project Wikis on Uploading, Workflow Software and Wireless Connectivity.  We were assigned the task of reading through these three wikis and providing feedback on: Content (clarity, quantity); Communication (between the students as collaborators) and Wiki Presentation (design, use of graphics, layout).

I have a class of 15 students so I assigned 5 students to each wiki.  I wanted them to assess the wiki individually before they decided on what their group feedback would be, so I used our school`s Google Apps account and it worked really well.

First I shared the assignment with them as a viewable Google Document.  This way I could include the links they would follow to get to all the wiki pages.  Then I had them start a new document of their own with the headings:

List 3 things that are very good about this wiki project.
List 2 suggestions for improving the wiki page.
List 1 piece of new knowledge our group has obtained thanks to this wiki page.

They filled in their individual documents while looking through their assigned wiki page and then shared their answers with the rest of their team using the share feature in Google Docs.

Next they created a new team document with the same headings as their individual one but shared between all members of the team.  They then read through each other`s answers and cut and pasted the ones they thought were the best ones into the shared group document.  I showed them how to use comments and they edited their final document as a team using comments and the chat feature in Google Apps.

For the final piece I put each of their team responses up on the screen at the front of the class and we did the final edits as a class.  I was then able to turn their work into a webpage and put the link on the Sounding Board wikis.

The process was really smooth.  It provided me with both individual and group work I could assess (although this wasn`t for marks) and they managed to produce some really great work in a short period of time.