What a fantastic weekend! A huge thank you to Andrew Churches for a thought-provoking and engaging weekend of learning here at YIS. Please visit the Authentic Assessment and Digital Media in the Classroom wiki to see all of the fabulous projects our participants created, and to take advantage of the wealth of resources Andrew shared.
This course is intended get us thinking about visual and media literacy, as well as design and creativity, so we have an amazing new co-facilitator, Frank Curkovic (MS/HS Art Teacher here at YIS), joining us.
Since we started off super busy with a weekend workshop and our first Tuesday meeting in the same week (yikes!), we now have a nice long stretch of time to explore, experiment and reflection (and blog!) until our next meeting on March 6th – in the Canteen.
These two videos prompted a great discussion about both the importance of play and experimentation in the classroom, and the need for recognizing “free time” on the computer as more than just “messing around“. Including:
How does ‘play’ and the celebration of failure as a way of learning carry through to HS from younger years? Does it?
We need to be aware that a digital sandbox is more permanent than real sandbox (it’s more like ‘wet cement’, rather than soft sand…)
In addition to digital forms of play, we can also aim to incorporate real life play (legos, games).
If students are spending massive amounts of time outside of school hours playing games (creating a “parallel curriculum” according to Jane McGoninigal, how can we bring these together?
We need Responsible Use Policies (and a common understanding of what they say) to ensure that misuse of a tool does not result in the confiscation of the tool.
Augmented reality, Four Square – there will be more crossover between game world and reality with changing technology.
The idea of gamers as a workforce was appealing, for example: Foldit – is using crowdsourcing to solve real world problems – protein folding, flu solutions.
Student gamers discussed: how can they be engaged and challenged?
Next, we took a look at the recent casebook: Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World and discussed how we can apply these Digital Citizenship elements in our specific areas of our schools. Some suggested strategies were:
Ways of practically implementing Digital Citzenship program – across different subjects and grade levels: not just ‘PSHE’ time.
Use specific people in each subject and grade level to implement different aspects of DC and document this in the curriculum
Has to be phased in and regularly monitored in relation to changes and topical issues / things that come up in classes.
Technology should not be blamed for behavior. It’s not the tool causing the problem; it’s the choices, ethics, behaviors.
A constant culture of discussion of ethics around Digital Citizenship needs to be encouraged and fostered in every school.
In addition to teaching students how (and why) to use Creative Commons media, we can also teach them to use their own original photos, create their own original music, and then share that media in a Creative Commons space as well.
Technology tools are only as good as how they are used to impart skills, and foster creativity, collaboration, connection.
Finally, we spent some time pimping our blogs! Everyone had a chance to:
The final project is due on December 16th – this is a great opportunity to work in grade-level or department teams.
The final project also includes 1 reflective blog post describing the process of creating the final project and how you plan to implement.
If none of these ideas appeal to you, please check with your instructor – we’ll find something that meets your needs!
Next Meetings:
Our next meeting is Tuesday, December 6th, from 4:30pm – 6:30pm in the Loft at YIS
Our final meeting for this class is Saturday, December 10th, from 9am – 4pm in the Canteen at YIS (please note the location change)
We’re almost there! Just two more weeks to go and you will be finished with your first two COETAIL classes! We’ll complete two more next semester, and the final course 5 during the fall of 2012.
Thanks to everyone who attended our first face-to-face meeting for Course 2 last night! Once again, it was another fantastic meeting with lots of great discussions and ideas. Sadly, it was time to say goodbye to Adam Clark as co-Instructor for Course 1, but happily we introduced Brian Farrell as co-Instructor for Course 2.
Discussion Highlights
Huge thanks to David, Gary and Ruth for taking awesome collaborative notes during the session so that I could write this post (without you guys, I would have forgotten all the good stuff!)
We started off with an interesting talk about why people share in public online spaces, like a blog:
to follow a favorite hobby or topic;
the person growth: sharing your thinking and ideas through writing, photography, videography, and engaging with others about those ideas helps make you a better person and professional;
to develop and maintain contact with people we have not yet met who we can collaborate with to support professional or personal growth;
share your personal interests, passions and skills with others, enabling you to be recognized for your talents among communities of creators;
building credit in the personal world like contacts in the digital world;
similar to the the family and traditional communities that exist in cultures like India;
building a positive online presence that will outweigh any negative content that could be published by others, owning your own digital profile.
We also talked about the flip side of sharing online, of course it can be great and result in amazing outcomes, like this story that Brian shared, but you always have to be aware of what you share because examples like this can have long reaching repercussions. So, the questions become:
How do we teach students to share appropriately online?
How do we help them understand that what seems cool and great to share now (as a teenager) may not seem so cool in 10-years time, like a “digital tattoo” you can’t get rid of.
As tools are constantly changing (eg: from MySpace to Facebook), how do you manage all the “old” accounts? Are we creating a “digital graveyard” of our lives in partially defunct spaces around the web?
We tried to watch this video, but the sound was not working right, if you have time, I highly recommend you watch at home:
Instead, we showed the video on this wiki as an introduction to the New Media Literacies readings we will be doing later in the course.
CyberSlueths
Groups had some great discussions as they did some cybersluething of our course instructors: Adam, Brian, Kim, Rebekah and Frank. Although we made it a bit of a challenge: to see how much you could find out, and to determine who you would hire if a position was open at your school, there were lots of search skills we covered by going through the process, including:
keyword manipulation & strategy
compare and contrast different search engine results
strategic website searches (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Rate My Teacher, Flickr)
critical evaluation of results
We wrapped up this discussion with an excerpt from this video of Evan Ratcliff discussing how people tried to find him when he tried to vanish for Wired Magazine. It was amazing to hear the variety of skills and strategies that those cyberslueths used to win the reward for finding Evan:
crowdsourcing to collaborate on a common goal
reverse algorithms to strip metadata from a picture and then search for those unique characteristics
strategic thinking based on extensive social media experience (narrowing down by friends on Facebook)
game based learning experience
How are we teaching those skills (and more) or using those strategies in our schools?
Course 2 Updates
Assignments & Deadlines:
1 blog post and 1 comment per week (total of 7).
Please include links for the comments (only) on the grading sheet.
Please record your Course 2 work in the same spreadsheet, using the Course 2 tab at the bottom of the page.
As you record your comments (week by week), please simply copy and paste the URL of the post into the column for Blog Post Title (this makes it easy to see that the blue URLs are your comments and the black titles are your posts.
Final Project Options (always includes 1 reflective blog post, which is post number 7):
Create or Modify a Responsible Use Agreement for your school
Create or Modify a Social Media policy for your school
Create or Modify a Unit Planner to focus/include Creative Commons or Digital Citizenship conceps
The importance of commenting:
We’re not asking you to comment just to make more work, it really is an essential part of the blogging process, commenting:
allows you to make connections with other bloggers
encourages other bloggers to read your blog
enables you to find others who are reading the same posts you are – which means they are probably interested in the same things you are
challenges your own ideas
is a conversation! Read the other comments people have left and join the discussion, rather than just leaving your own thoughts without engaging with others
can (should?) be a thoughtful, and meaningful process, which includes links and references to other work to continue to push thinking deeper.
Next Meeting: Saturday, November 26th, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm in the Loft at YIS (lunch provided).
We invite you to join us Saturday evening as well for our Pecha Kucha night, as part of our annual Bridging the Gap Conference. It will be a low-key, interesting and engaging evening of Pecha Kucha-style presentations from many different members of the YIS community. We would also love to have some COETAIL members present, especially those from outside of YIS! Please let me know if you’d like to attend.
Welcome back! We’re now ready to start our second course, focused mostly on Digital Citizenship and Copyright & Creative Commons. Thankfully, we have superstar YIS librarian, Brian Farrell, with us as an instructor to help us navigate the wild and crazy world of copyright!
Our first week looks at the importance of having a positive online presence, which everyone in the course is building through regular blogging. As you read through the readings this week, think about how we can embed this kind of experience in our classrooms as well as we are doing it in our professional lives.
A few reminders:
Our next meeting is next Tuesday, November 8th from 4:30 – 6:30 in the Loft at YIS.
All Course 2 documents are now shared in the COETAIL@YIS collection in Google Docs. You can find Course 2 Week 1 there as well, so you can get started with this week’s readings.
Assignments for Course 2 follow the same process as Course 1: 1 blog post per week, 1 comment per week plus a final project at the end with an additional reflective blog post. All assignments are due by: December 17, 2011, by then you should have:
All grading for Course 1 will be completed this week. Your instructor will e-mail you (individually) your final grade for Course 1. Please let Adam or me know if you have any questions. Please ensure that all of your work for Course 1 has been completed.
Looking forward to seeing everyone at YIS next week!
Another fantastic meeting, lots of great ideas and questions to prompt our discussions last night. Thank you! Here’s a short recap of what we covered, again, please feel free to add anything I missed in the comments.
Discussion Highlights
We started our meeting off with a great intro from YIS Headmaster, James MacDonald. A huge thank you to James for taking time out of his very busy day to talk to us! Most of James’ talk centered on the Connected Learning Community program that we implemented this school year. For those of you that are interested in learning a little more about what we’ve done, here are a few resources that might be interesting:
Going 1:1 has been an amazingly smooth process here, and I’m sure our staff would be happy to talk about how it’s changed the teaching and learning environment any time. Course 4 will focus more on these kinds of practicalities, but we certainly don’t have to hold off conversations until then if people are interested now
After James’ intro, we watched a short video from Good to prompt our small group discussions:
This prompted us to talk about the role of motivation in student learning, which lead to a short discussion about Sugata Mitra’s work on the “Hole in the Wall” project, and his TED Talk, along with another short video which sums up one aspect of his research findings:
Both videos, and some of the reading we’ve been doing, also prompted a short discussion on the future of teaching as a career, and how our profession is and will continue to change. Of course, lots of people are talking about this in various networks online, here are a few articles that might prompt your thinking and continue the discussion in our cohort meetings:
Add your thoughts in the comments, or reflect on your own blog.
The Horizon Report
We spent the majority of our session digesting and understanding the 6 trends in the Horizon Report. There are a few interesting highlights about this report and how it’s produced that James hit upon in his introduction:
For starters, the Report is a great tool to use as a benchmark for your school. If your administrators and teachers read the report and think, “Great, we’re doing, or at least thinking about doing, most of these things” than you’re probably right on track with educational technology trends on a global scale. However, if your administrators and teachers read the report and think, “What?! I don’t understand any of this!” perhaps it’s time for a reframing of how you view technology and it’s role in your school. Because the report is developed by educators and researchers from around the world, it really is a true representation of what’s on the horizon (wink, wink).
The Report is also fascinating for the way it is developed. I have been fortunate to be on the K12 Advisory Board for the last three years (or so) and every year I amazed at how it’s put together. Basically, the entire report grows totally organically from the seeds that the NMC plants for us. They share some highlighted trends that they have identified and we read, share, and collect resources and research from around the world, organize everything on a collaborative wiki, add our thoughts and reflections in a central space, and then go through several layers of voting to determine which trends will happen at which time, which challenges are the most prevalent, and which general educational trends are key. I have never had the opportunity to meet with any of the other Advisory Board members in person, but we have successfully collaborated for several years to produce a very tangible and well-respected report. The NMC, and especially Larry Johnson, do an amazing job of bringing this group of people together and facilitating the project from start to finish in such a collaborative and engaging way, the process actually provides just as much of a vision for the future of learning as the actual report does!
Several fantastic resources were shared for the 6 trends in the small group discussions:
Finally we did a wrap-up of the course and a brief overview of how to complete the final project.
Course 1 Requirements: A total of 6 weekly blog posts + the Final Project described below (for a total of 7 blog posts and 1 unit)
Deadline: All Course 1 work must be completed by: 23 October 2011
Final Project Components:
1 Unit Planner (not a lesson planner, this is big picture)
1 blog post reflection about your unit planner, covering these kinds of topics:
How did you develop the unit?
How are you planning to implement the unit?
If you were able to implement, how did it go? What would you change?
If you have not implemented yet, what are your main concerns? What are your goals?
For those who would like some resources for UbD, I’ve bookmarked a few favorites. If anyone has anything else that might be helpful, please feel free to share those in the comments.
Once you finish your unit planner and write your reflection, please embed your unit into the blog post. Thanks to Jeff for creating this video that demonstrates how to do it!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns! Looking forward to Course 2!
