Talkin' 'bout my cerebration.

This post caters for participants at the Queensland Schools Project (Donate Life) conference held in Brisbane on Monday 30th November 2009.  Unfortunately there was no internet connection at the conference and I was unable to show the participants what my virtual learning space for this particular unit looked like.

I spoke about the delivery of information to students via an RSS feed.  This originated in a number of places.

1. Learning Place Project Room.

A project room allows you to host a number of what they term activities.  I establish a range of blogs and podcasts to cater for different streams of information.  The picture below is a screenshot of my project room showing blogs for units of work and extension activities for the class.  This is where I post the learning activities / directions for the students to follow, and provides the archive when students need to venture back in time to previous learning activities and directions.

Where I base all lesson directions and tasks.

In the image above the specific activity which is the blogs for the Organ and Tissue Donation unit has been circled.  This will generate a different RSS feed from the other unit blogs that exist in this project room.  The image blow shows one of the blog posts.

An example post.

Conversations held during class time were recorded as concept maps on the iPod Touch using SimpleMindX.  As each conversation was completed, the mind map was saved and exported to the camera roll.  Syncing the iPod Touch then copied the mind map into iPhoto where I could upload it to Flickr.  In Flickr the maps were tagged specifically to enable search and subsequent RSS feeds.  This allowed creation of Flickr slideshows and the embedding of these in BlackBoard.  Despite Flickr being filtered for students at the school level, they could still access these on external computers.  I chose not to save them as images and load these into the virtual classroom as there were numerous conversations held and therefore numerous maps created.  Students could search through the Flickr collection to locate the specific maps they required. An example image is presented below;

All student interaction was housed in the BlackBoard Virtual Classroom.  This is where I embedded the recorded conversations as Flickr slideshows and the student blogs were kept.  As explained at the conference, the process of blogging (and in particular the process I was aiming to achieve for this assessment item) was dependent on comments and questions being posted underneath the blogs.  As this process ensues, it will not present logically on the screen.  There is a seemingly illogical approach to reading a blog when you consider a series of posts and comments as the submitted assessment item.  The reverse chronological order of posts can be quite deceiving.  The images below are arranged in a logical order to enable you to see the process as work.

Student's blog entry.

Comments and questions by people viewing the blog.

Follow up entry by student blogging (responding to comments)

As you can see, this process calls upon the student’s ability to reason and validate their position (or argument).  The quality of the response is influenced by the quality of the evidence used to support their arguments.

The process of delivering content and learning tasks prior to the timetabled lesson enabled engaging and critical conversations to be held during class time.  This ensured higher order thinking skills were utilised regularly and a notable increase in engagement and learning occurred.  The blogging of learning experiences enabled those conversations to continue outside the tradaitional boundaries of the timetable, significantly increasing the time spent on learning in this subject area.  The graphs generated from course statistics show a peak on early in the week as students access the lesson directions, and daily peaks for blogging between the hours of 9pm and 2am.  As I stated at the conference, by allowing students to choose when they attend to the learning and conversation (who am I to suggest their learning or attention peaks when the bell for my class goes).  Allowing them to choose when to engage, I enable them to express their opinions as they see fit.

This could not ahve been a success without the assistance of my invited special guests, especially those who commented on the students’ blogs.  Thank you for your kindness and generosity of time.

My two previous posts have referred to a professional development session which I was fortunate enough to be invited to, discussing a framework for eLearning.  At this professional development conference I had the opportunity to experience productive and collaborative collation of notes and resources with @jnxyz, @gayleenjackson, @checkingboxes, @hoyshane and a number of other conference participants, and demonstrate the power of this to other conference attendees.  For me it was exciting to participate, and ultimately rewarding when I reflect back on the portfolio of information, links and resources we have developed.

Initially a conference tag needed to be set, and this can be seen in my previous posts.   I have invested more of my time into consistently tagging my information across various platforms recently, and realise the convenience of setting and using such a tag.  When we explained the tag to the group, my perception was that many did not understand what I was talking about.  If you do not,search in google for #WTDW and you will see the benefits of a common tag for an event. @gayleenjackson set the tag, and we were away.

The collaboration consisted of tagged tweets in Twitter, public notes in Evernote, bookmarks in Delicious, a conference Ning and an etherpad.  These allowed us to post links to resources, import RSS feeds and sort information for our liking.  Through this whole process I see two significant benefits;

1. All the information is stored in the cloud, and is therefore accessible to anyone.
2. Collaborative memory is more extensive than individual memory.

My brain has been running since thinking how can I incorporate this in my teaching.  Currently I use tags, and searches of tags, to provide feeds of information from my work to students.  I could definitely use public evernotes to proide links to my notes.  Currently I export Zotero notebooks to students who use Zotero.  The same could be done for students using evernote.  We do collaboratively research and store this in a wiki within BlackBoard, but this is generally typed, copied or links.  I could expand this by educating students on RSS feeds and tags.  However one main difference remains.  In this collaborative experience, we each contributed how we were comfortable and then shared with each other.  Some conference members were only comfortable sharing within the Ning blogs.  What is important is the sharing, the collaboration.  The location is simply a function of familiarity and choice.  The colleagues I worked with on this day are more comfortable with the tools mentioned, and this is where I regularly interact with them.  My students however collaborate in entirely different forums and environments.  It is unreasonable for me to expect them to move to my way of thinking (as I have with Zotero) without similar adaptation in reversed roles.  I should be learning about their environments more concentratedly, and exploring options to utilise that for productive communication, collaboration and learning.

The power of networked learning outperforms that of any individual.  It was great to experience real collaboration (common goal and unrestricted sharing) and I’ve no doubtmy learning has benefitted.

The TPACK framework has inspired me to work within my own school to build and implement an eLearning framework – something which has been sadly lacking.  I’m excited to work with @skhill_03, a senior English teacher who is our nominated Digital Pedagogy Leader (a regional program conducted by @djone91) and the Deputy Principals responsible for IT and Pedagogy.  We will base the framework on Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain as it is already instilled as a framework for our academic excellence program.  We intend to develop a community approach to sharing productive digital pedagogy which ties in with the staff review and performance plans that will be implemented later this semester.  As this project progresses I will undoubtedly report on it here.

My pet subject of Health Education requires students and teachers to continually read, research and gather information to inform their understanding and application of concepts.  This research was recently revealed as a concern for students when I conducted an open, critical reflection in class.  Therefore to enable this process, I have endeavoured to establish a routine with specific tools that can assist research.

Firstly, I set my students up with portable FireFox on their USB memory stick or in a folder on their network storage.  Portable FireFox allows me to install two essential addons for research; Zotero and FoxIt Toolbar.  I have blogged about Zotero previously, and have recorded podcasts on both of these tools also.

I will gather a range of resources for research.  Using the FoxIt toolbar in FireFox, I can annotate and highlight PDF files.  If I then choose to “Save As”, all markups will be maintained.  I use this to add in bookmarks and highlights for important information.  When students open the file, they can quickly navigate to what I consider important information within the document.

As an extension to this concept, when students are working on group projects, they can markup their research individually or collaboratively.  If it is a web page they wish to markup, they simply print using PDF Creator and save the page as a PDF file.  Then they open the file in FireFox and markup.

Zotero allows them to create collections of resources, which can include webpages and PDF files.  This ensures wherever they are using Portable FireFox they can access their research.

If I build a collection in Zotero, I can export it as a file with attachments, and then distribute that to my students.  They simply import the collection into their Zotero and they have my collection ready to go.  This is also useful when they share research with each other.  Simply export the collection and share.

Zotero can also publish a bibliography.  Users need to ensure the information is recorded in the Zotero reference section, but this function enables accurate bibliographies.

And best of all, these tools are free.

Enable student research, and you can enable student achievement.

If you would rather watch this as a screencast, please refer to my wiki.

I’ve referred to my employing organisations framework and infrastructure in this blog before.  As I prepare for a meeting tomorrow to review this framework I am reminded of the even bigger picture.

There are a lot of groups and organisations who research and prepare standards and guidelines for pedagogy and ICTs.  In an age where performance based pay for teachers is often discussed, standards seem to become ever so important.  Indeed, certifications and qualifications are base on standards.  As my journey with digital pedagogy continues I have become increasingly aware of the standards present and relevant to my work within my organisation.

The ISTE  National Educational Technology Standards (NETS•T)  and Performance Indicators for Teachers, and the UNESCO ICT competency standards for teachers are two of the global sets of standards that are relevant, particularly in an era where “common curriculum” seems to be the desire of those wanting national curriculum standards.  I particularly like the reading of the ISTE standards.

The first standard is simply “Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity.”  I like how this is stated before any use or exploration of digital tools and methods.  After all, isn’t this our core business, student learning?  Whether we do this with digital pedagogy or not is irrelevant in the long run.  All that really matters is have we inspired learning.

If during this inspiration we provide opportunity for learners to develop skills and competencies with digital tools, then that is a bonus.  I often query teachers who believe it is the digital tools that inspire, by asking them to determine if the learners are inspired or entertained.  It is the person who inspires, which for me is fundamentally why human contact is the most important ingredient in any learning environment.  The human contact does not need to be face to face, as demonstrated by the vast number of teachers who consider Twitter a significant component of their learning environment.  There is certainly human contact there.

We are a lucky group of people that have significant impact on the lives, development and emotions of numerous people every year.  Why would you do any other job?