After 2 weeks of painstaking research and preparation centred around the predictions in the Horizon Report K-12 2012, we have this year's assessment of the future of education technology. The presentations went very well, most running over time due to incredible discussions the topics generated. The biggest project of the year so far yielded some excellent results:
Great work everyone!
Thursday 8 November 2012
Friday 19 October 2012
Projects, Projects
We've spent the last two weeks working diligently on our projects as assigned through TeamLab. Mostly, we've prepared the "How To" videos for our respective tools.
At this point all of the videos are done, and some are making their way onto YouTube:
Early next week, all of the videos should be on YouTube.
We also started in on a project involving the Horizon Report, that involves detailed investigative research into the tools presented in the report, a presentation and group discussion using a Prezi as visual support, and blog entry devoted to analyzing the technology and its suitability for Thomson's educational needs.
The project is outlined in this document.
At this point all of the videos are done, and some are making their way onto YouTube:
Early next week, all of the videos should be on YouTube.
We also started in on a project involving the Horizon Report, that involves detailed investigative research into the tools presented in the report, a presentation and group discussion using a Prezi as visual support, and blog entry devoted to analyzing the technology and its suitability for Thomson's educational needs.
The project is outlined in this document.
Friday 5 October 2012
iPad Implementation
I was excited to see some excellent cooperation, communication, and collaboration being applied as the teams designed their structures.
Now, we need to apply that to our real world tasks as assigned through TeamLab.
These screen shots were taken on day 1 of the project, and show some of the early development and planning.
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| Need better access to food? Gardening. A great teachable moment: survivors in Minecraft come to the same solution for a reliable food supply as early human societies. Students just simulated the reason and cause for the invention of agriculture! (and it wasn't part of the assignment to do this) |
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| Structures of great scale and ambition require a lot of resources and a lot of cooperation. |
The project contains five key functionalities:
- The ability to record video
- The ability to take and customize photos
- The ability to create custom drawings and annotations
- The ability to record audio
- ... And the ability to publish all of it as a single rich digital book (we accomplished this through Pages)
Our task will be to create comprehensive "How To" guides for all of the tools, as well as for the iPad itself, and to provide support, guidance and expertise to students during their project (to be completed in December). In order to accomplish our goal, we first tried out the apps. Some worked as intended, others did not.
In the end, the big winners were Pages, Educreations, and Doodlebuddy. There was an additional app for voice recordings, should the creator opt for an audio-only narration over a video.
We spent Friday trying to create a project similar to the one the ESL students are to be assigned, but due to a lockdown interrupting things (and some distractions that need to be worked on: see right), we weren't able to complete a true exemplar that could be used to demonstrate what we can ultimately do with these devices.
I'll be marking the blogs over the weekend, so please make sure that you have all of your posts, including your lesson plan, up for me to grade. I need to submit your interim evaluations on Tuesday.
Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!
Monday 1 October 2012
Project-Based Learning
This past week we looked at project-based learning, considering how this class structure could make lessons and assessments more relevant for students:
This cues into the video we watched in week 1 by Sir Ken Robinson "Changing Education Paradigms". Both videos suggest that modern education should focus less on more traditional modes of education, and more on real tasks that allow students to work in teams (social learning - remember the 12 Brain/Mind Learning Principles?), and creatively problem solve.
One of the key challenges to this model is that it requires a considerable amount of personal responsibility on the part of the students, and an ability to cooperate as a team, neither of which may be present without some coaching on the part of the teacher.
Paul Anderson, in his experiment to "gamify" his classroom, notes that while the experiment was successful in engaging students, he lost a certain element of control that had previously allowed him to ensure that every student had achieved. He likened it to the difference between putting the students on a bus - where the teacher can drive them all to the destination at a uniform speed and ensure that no one gets lost - and giving each student the keys to a car - some will make it to the destination quite quickly, while others can potentially "drive into a wall".
We followed this up with a look at our project planning space at dmtwires.teamlab.com, an incredibly powerful project management tool designed originally for small businesses. In keeping with the agenda of our class to service the school in a capacity that aspires to professionalism, we'll use a professional tool to manage our workflow. As projects are submitted to us, the TeamLab space will fill up, and you may find yourself working on several projects at once. Some of you will be appointed as project managers, working with a team to accomplish the goal.
On Friday, we took a stab at using Minecraft, a game frequently mentioned in educational circles for its ability to teach a number of important curricular and life skills, with a goal of building a home within the hour we had to play. I based the idea for the lesson off of this video that Minecraft pioneer Joel Levin used with a group of second-grade students:
In our class, I was impressed to see individuals taking on leadership roles, teaching others and helping to coordinate the effort. I also saw how things can go wrong when a group doesn't communicate - as witnessed by the way each individual, in spite of collaborating on gathering resources, sought to erect their own home rather than build the coordinated structure intended. We even had a troll, who worked against the aims of the group and sought to disrupt their progress.
If our efforts to accomplish our goals for teachers are to be successful, we will need to find a way to overcome these challenges, learn to plan ahead, communicate, and collaborate better than we did on Friday.
This cues into the video we watched in week 1 by Sir Ken Robinson "Changing Education Paradigms". Both videos suggest that modern education should focus less on more traditional modes of education, and more on real tasks that allow students to work in teams (social learning - remember the 12 Brain/Mind Learning Principles?), and creatively problem solve.
One of the key challenges to this model is that it requires a considerable amount of personal responsibility on the part of the students, and an ability to cooperate as a team, neither of which may be present without some coaching on the part of the teacher.
Paul Anderson, in his experiment to "gamify" his classroom, notes that while the experiment was successful in engaging students, he lost a certain element of control that had previously allowed him to ensure that every student had achieved. He likened it to the difference between putting the students on a bus - where the teacher can drive them all to the destination at a uniform speed and ensure that no one gets lost - and giving each student the keys to a car - some will make it to the destination quite quickly, while others can potentially "drive into a wall".
We followed this up with a look at our project planning space at dmtwires.teamlab.com, an incredibly powerful project management tool designed originally for small businesses. In keeping with the agenda of our class to service the school in a capacity that aspires to professionalism, we'll use a professional tool to manage our workflow. As projects are submitted to us, the TeamLab space will fill up, and you may find yourself working on several projects at once. Some of you will be appointed as project managers, working with a team to accomplish the goal.
On Friday, we took a stab at using Minecraft, a game frequently mentioned in educational circles for its ability to teach a number of important curricular and life skills, with a goal of building a home within the hour we had to play. I based the idea for the lesson off of this video that Minecraft pioneer Joel Levin used with a group of second-grade students:
In our class, I was impressed to see individuals taking on leadership roles, teaching others and helping to coordinate the effort. I also saw how things can go wrong when a group doesn't communicate - as witnessed by the way each individual, in spite of collaborating on gathering resources, sought to erect their own home rather than build the coordinated structure intended. We even had a troll, who worked against the aims of the group and sought to disrupt their progress.
If our efforts to accomplish our goals for teachers are to be successful, we will need to find a way to overcome these challenges, learn to plan ahead, communicate, and collaborate better than we did on Friday.
Wednesday 19 September 2012
How to Teach?
From the context of our exploration of games, we came to education - and the key challenge of engagement. We looked back to the 12 Brain/Mind Learning Principles, to recognize the importance of emotion to the learning process. We discussed as a class the impacts of positive and negative reinforcement on motivation and learning, and investigated the fight or flight response to stress.
Students took a look at the curriculum from the Ministry of Education website, and learned how to read curriculum documents. They also learned about the policies followed by teachers to ensure they are correctly following and evaluating the curriculum. They applied their skills to locating curriculum expectations that could be connected to the game they investigated for homework on the weekend.
We then explored Multiple Intelligences Theory by taking a quiz on the Birmingham Grid for Learning website. Students shared their codes, and their highest and lowest rated intelligence, and speculated on how different teaching styles could fit their preferred learning style.
To bring the activity full-circle, students were assigned to create a curriculum-based lesson using a custom lesson plan template. The lesson could cover any subject area or grade, but had to include the effective use of a game. The areas of the template are explained as follows:
- Learning Goals - these are specifically tailored to the outcomes measured at the end of the lesson - what will students specifically be able to do after the lesson is complete?
- Curriculum Expectations - these are taken directly from the ministry documents and are the basis for the lesson.
- Minds On / Hook - the start of the lesson should get students engaged and in the correct mindset (increasing readiness to learn).
- Action - what do the students do in order to achieve the learning goals?
- Consolidation - how do we assess the learning and ensure that students are prepared to apply the learning to new and broader contexts?
It was pointed out that lessons do not need to take place in a single class period, but could potentially stretch over several days. Students were asked to pace their lesson appropriately.
Teaching with Technology
We began our exploration into the integration of technology into education with Did You Know 3.0?, a video that explores the ways in which the world is changing:
From there we listened to Dr. Willard Daggett, speaking to the need for adaptation in the face of technological innovation:
We then listened to an excerpt from a keynote address by Marc Prensky, the man who coined the term "Digital Natives" to describe the modern internet enabled generation. He alludes to a speech that I attended at York University in 2006, where TDSB students (some of them from Thomson), participated in a technology workshop that paralleled the workshops teachers were attending. The end results of their work impressed the teachers, and helped Prensky make his point about the need to integrate technology into learning to reach kids where their experiences are.
We also explored Ben Stone's address to a business crowd, speaking to the ways that ideas like Prensky's "Digital Natives" are reshaping not just K-12 education, but corporate training as well. He suggests that he's not quite ready to get fully on-board with Prensky's message of game-based learning.
This exploration prompted the second blog post: Innovation in Education: A Case Study
We moved further into this line of inquiry with Gabe Zichermann's TED talk on Gamification. Zichermann gives several good examples of ways that game concepts can be applied to real-life situations to produce the right motivations in people. (Like the speed ticket lottery idea)
We looked at how this concept of Gamification could be applied to teaching in schools. Students had homework over the weekend to play a game and consider how it could be used in an educational context, for educational goals.
From there we listened to Dr. Willard Daggett, speaking to the need for adaptation in the face of technological innovation:
We then listened to an excerpt from a keynote address by Marc Prensky, the man who coined the term "Digital Natives" to describe the modern internet enabled generation. He alludes to a speech that I attended at York University in 2006, where TDSB students (some of them from Thomson), participated in a technology workshop that paralleled the workshops teachers were attending. The end results of their work impressed the teachers, and helped Prensky make his point about the need to integrate technology into learning to reach kids where their experiences are.
We also explored Ben Stone's address to a business crowd, speaking to the ways that ideas like Prensky's "Digital Natives" are reshaping not just K-12 education, but corporate training as well. He suggests that he's not quite ready to get fully on-board with Prensky's message of game-based learning.
This exploration prompted the second blog post: Innovation in Education: A Case Study
We moved further into this line of inquiry with Gabe Zichermann's TED talk on Gamification. Zichermann gives several good examples of ways that game concepts can be applied to real-life situations to produce the right motivations in people. (Like the speed ticket lottery idea)
We looked at how this concept of Gamification could be applied to teaching in schools. Students had homework over the weekend to play a game and consider how it could be used in an educational context, for educational goals.
Monday 10 September 2012
Blog Posts
Blog posts (like journals) will form a large part of the "academic" portion of the course. Set up a blog on a service like Blogger, Wordpress, Blogspot, or another blog service of your choice. Your blog assignments can be found in the Blog List document shared with you here and through twitter.
In order to be graded, I must be able to read your blog post. Share your blog link with me and ensure that I can comment on your post (if there's an option to turn this off, don't - I use the comments feature to give you feedback on your post).
Please share your blog address through this form:
In order to be graded, I must be able to read your blog post. Share your blog link with me and ensure that I can comment on your post (if there's an option to turn this off, don't - I use the comments feature to give you feedback on your post).
Please share your blog address through this form:
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