Greg Walker Professional Reflection

Motivation

To explore and discover web tools that useful for richer learning in education. To be able to assist and train my colleagues so they may use web tools in their teaching.

Intended goals / outcomes

• To discover and explore Web 2.0 tools
• To find which ones are useful and have a genuine purpose for classroom use.
• To develop my knowledge to assist my colleagues in implementing their own skills.
• To enable rich learning for students.
• To establish collaborative learning amongst students

Description of the activity

The initial focus was to set a school community using the NING social network sight. It is very useful friendly. Students adapted easily. Choices to make, what web tool in for what purpose? Whether to use groups within NING or a separate word press blog.

Started with NING. Used Ning to explore Stixy notes, bubble us. Students create own profiles, added photo albums, completed blogs and group discussions. Ning completes with Facebook, Myspace, however some year 7 students started using NING outside of school. It kept track of student participation, however some slack students slipped through initially. Naturally it is a private site.

Other tools used within NING

• Use GROUP in NING to further explore and trial a variety of web tools.
• Stixy, way to express thoughts, non threatening way.
• Diigo bookmarks- check out some of my bookmarks
• Bubbl.us Comment on brain storming.

Used groups for different subjects.

Started Word Press blogs for electives- movie making, computer graphics. This will continue as each teacher will have their own subject blog. PD Blog set up for teachers, to allow for demonstration and sandpit time. These will be used in term for with the interactive whiteboards.

http://vccmoviemaking.wordpress.com/

http://vcc910computergraphics.wordpress.com/

Implemented VCC toolbar to organise everything, though it has grown and needs further planning!

http://vcclinks.OurToolbar.com/

VET ICT cert II needed its own subject NING site- with 15 groups set up for each Unit. This allowed students to access Class Power Points, assessment Tasks outside of class. http://ictcertificate2.wordpress.com/

VET ICT cert II has its own word press blog for lesson plans, and links to each of the 15 units. http://vccvet.ning.com/

Still writing the VET course, added these blog tools 6 months into the course. I will use these more consistently from the start of next year.

Use of Online / Web 2 resources & tools

Useful web 2.0 resources

http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/10/04/the-best-web-20-applications-for-education-2009/

http://www.learningplace.com.au/deliver/content.asp?pid=38760

http://www.go2web20.net/

Anecdotes from Design / Implementation

Still teacher lead in many cases, needs more collaborative input. Having web tools doesn’t always encourage class participation. The ability to monitor progress of individual progress of students can be time consuming. Though, if it is collaborative and spontaneous learning, it’s hard to monitor everything, more the final outcome. Previously used Blogger- sequential structure. Ning groups are different.

Final Reflection

It has been very beneficial to discover many useful web 2.0 tools. I have trial quite a few with a variety of classes. They have not been used consistently in class thought. I would like to have a more consistent approach from next year. To develop regularly routine of using web tools each lesson- first 10 minutes.

Need to have a purpose behind ICT and web tools, not using them for the sake of it.

Motivation

The college has invested heavily in infrastructure and hardware. The challenge was to ensure the students were able to benefit immediately and substantially from the newly acquired resources. We therefore had a blank canvas, and although many of our teachers had made a start with Web 2, we were determined to maximise the benefits of the technology across the Middle School section.  Our strategy was to develop a learning community through the use of a NING space capable of facilitating the delivery of a range of relevant and straightforward Web 2 learning and teaching approaches.

Intended goals /outcomes

• To equip Mid Sch teachers with a generic set of web 2 teaching tools and facilities/resources.
• To lay the foundation for the implementation of pedagogies promoting critical thinking/inquiry based learning
• To promote an online learning community across the middle school.

Description of the Activity

Students would access ‘Look to Learn’ activities via blogs/discussion forums or in the classroom with a whiteboard.  Teachers would engage in action research to analyse the effects of the approach and share their professional learning with colleagues in an informal face to face ‘show and tell’ forum.  ‘Pageflakes’ is intended to be used as a stand-alone resource to be trialled with students in Geography, History and English.  Again the sharing of best practice in various contexts and the refinement of materials through consultation with others in the learning community is seen as the most effective approach in ensuring that the technologies are imbedded.

Use of Online / Web 2 resources & tools

The main Web 2 tools used so far are:

• WordPress & embedded media
• Pageflakes Feeds
• Look to Learn Site
• Look to Learn Links
• Ning Site

Anecdotes from Design/Implementation: Look to Learn, Teacher quotes:

“It will help me to think more intentionally about the questions I have been framing in my current process (collaboration on EduKate). It will give me other options to improve and enhance my current teaching tools.”

“ I think the sample prompts are excellent! I have used some of them before like the bubble maps, but there are heaps of other ideas which I think will give a lot more variety in how I present critical thinking in my lessons. There are some excellent tools and resources to use also.”

“It is handy to know that this can be run with students writing their answers on a worksheet, in their books, on a blog post or another electronic submission format. I could definitely make use of a wide range of resources to show the whole class, and then have them respond in their books for a once-a-week Bible class reflection. It will also be a fantastic attention-capturing device.”

Final Reflection

Teachers are time poor and the use of technology that actually meaningfully ‘mechanises’ learning and teaching around rich resources that are widely available and easily accessible is possibly the most exciting outcome of the project to date.  Our role, as educational leaders, is primarily to build purposeful and meaningful learning communities, promoting a culture of success through commitment to continuous improvement through the building of relationships and sharing of learning, ideas, thoughts and feelings.  The technology and approaches we have explored to date have helped to promote these elements.

The project is just getting started and time will tell what the medium and long term effects  will be.  We certainly have managed to inspire a team approach and enthusiastic response from our target team. The staff Ning will continue to orientate our teachers to the technology prior to a full roll out of our student Ning in 2010.

Click on the following link to have a look at our recently launched Staff Ning

http://bccmsstaff.ning.com/forum

Motivation
A desire to share what I was learning with the other staff at the school and to get past my fear of the big wide digital world out there and use it for something practical. It has been great because I have had to keep up the practice of uploading things so I don’t forget how to.

Intended goals / outcomes
My intended goal was to get teachers using their IWBs more and then to get them using them more interactively. Whilst we succeeded in increasing their usage, the interactivity issue still needs more work. I also wanted teachers to be able to access my IWB hints from home, which they couldn’t do before now as we didn’t have network access at home. This means teachers can read things in their own time and can remind themselves of a skill when they need it i.e. as they are trying to create a flipchart at home.

Description of the activity
My activity was not student based as I don’t have a class. Rather it was simply the setting up of this blog, which teachers can use to access the IWB hints which I have written or to find links to interesting websites/articles/other blogs/wikis etc. I want to build this into a really useful resource for all our staff to access, as a way of encouraging them to discover more interesting ways to use their IWB than just a glorified data projector.

Use of Online / Web 2 resources & tools
I used wordpress to create the blog, as well as creating a box.net account to enable flipcharts and files to be added to the blog. This took me all year to master but I am finally there. When our diigo updates come in, I look through them and upload the most useful sites to the blog, then I regularly send an email to remind the staff that it is there. The blog is found at http://kanga1.wordpress.com

Anecdotes from Design / Implementation
Whilst not all of the staff are utilising this site, those that are seem to be finding it useful. I have had positive feedback from a number of people. Having said that, I have a number of staff who won’t even try it because it is new and scary and they don’t feel they need to change old habits. I have stopped adding my IWB hints to our school network, so they can only access them from the blog. This has upset a couple of people, one of whom asked me to email her the hints so she could add them on to the network “…. because quite a lot of recent ones are missing.” When I pointed out that that was the whole point of the blog, she was a bit miffed and didn’t see why we had to do it differently.

Final Reflection
When I started this process, I had no idea what a blog was, let alone a wiki or a tag or a word cloud etc etc etc. Pageflakes sounded like something that happened when silver fish had got into the library. The learning curve has been huge and it took me until the last session to start to understand what Tom was talking about. I still need to reinvestigate a lot of the things we did early on because I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t get any of it. I am not a digital native, I am definitely a digital immigrant and so I am learning the lingo of this brave new world but I still struggle with the translations. I want to learn more about podcasts, nings, webquests and using look to learn but I know they will come as I ‘play’ more and gain confidence. I do have some staff who are ready and eager to push through but most are not ready for that next step.

AGQTP ICT – ESP+I
What was your project focus?
Incorporating Web 2.0 into the curriculum and teaching practice across Middle School.

• What did you do? Created a wiki page on our Middle School integrated unit ‘Be Different’. For this students had to read and watch various information based around ways that we can be different and not their responses on an assigned wiki page. The topics included illegal downloading, speeding and excessive wastage and looked at how society is portrayed to view these themes and then contrast that to the Bible. Students were required to simply participate and record their thoughts.

Website for activity is:

http://bedifferent.wikispaces.com/

Need to be a member to view however.
livory@covenant.vic.edu.au

Experience

The most helpful thing that I did to change my thinking about integrating ICT into my classroom was to give it a go. When I started this PD there were many aspects that I thought ‘what is the point of that?’ and viewed some aspects as a very time consuming way of doing something that I already did. After having a go of it however I now view many of those tools as just one way of doing something different in my classroom from time to time

To help integrate some aspects of Web 2.0 into the classroom of fellow colleagues I led a brief introduction into some aspects such as Look to Learn activities. I also led a more detailed PD session into wiki pages and created a ‘how to make a wiki page document’ which I distributed to the other staff. Currently 2 staff (one outside our initial target group) have used this document to create (or start to create) their own wiki page.

Many students have responded well to a different way or learning within my classroom. My initial attempts at incorporating wiki pages into lessons was with my own class and worked exceptionally well despite a few initial hiccups. The students really enjoyed entering their responses to activities on-line and the responses were in many ways more in-depth compared to responses using other methods in previous year (with different students though but a comparable class).

Struggles

The main issue I found with my initial wiki page was managing it within the lesson to allow everyone to contribute but ensuring no one was ‘procrastinating’. With my second wiki page for all of middle school the problems I encountered were our school server blocking students’ access to YouTube videos even when they were embedded within the wiki page. Now I have the problem of a slight pause while waiting for the videos to buffer. The main problem I encountered with the Middle School group however was one that I did not encounter with my own class and one that surprised me to the extent that it occurred. This was the phenomenon of ‘stupid technologically ignorant teacher syndrome’ where several of the students (some of them generally ‘good’ students) completely tuned out when I was explaining how to complete the activity and operate the wiki page. ‘Tuning out’ happens in all classes from time to time (especially during instruction) but the extent of this was more extreme. Many students just assumed that as the activity had to do with computers and was on the internet, they didn’t have to listen to me as they would clearly know more about this sort of thing than me and would be easily able to figure it out. Some students still didn’t ask for assistance after deleting the entire contents of a page from my wiki (grrrrrr!  )
I do have to say though that the majority of students did end up doing quite well.

What did you do to overcome or lessen the impact of these?
To overcome these problems I simply told the class off for thinking I knew nothing about computers and instructed them on what to do again. My initial problem of no access to YouTube for students was overcome by contacting all the people who had posted the videos that I wanted to use onto YouTube and asking them for their permission to download them (it is against YouTube’s user policy to download any clips without the posters permission). They all said yes.

So far all the targeted staff have responded really well to incorporating Web 2.0 and seem enthusiastic to do so.

Puzzles

The main question was really how do we integrate Web 2.0 tools in a constructive manner. For me it was mainly how do we do this without simply using Web 2.0 for the sake of doing so. If it is quicker and easier to do it another way, why do it?

+Insight

Overall this has been a constructive time for myself and the target staff at Covenant College for implementing Web 2.0. We started at varying degrees of competency and understanding of ICT and I would say are now all confident in implementing Web 2.0 tools as teaching and learning aids and also allowing our students to both use and create with these same tools.

Our Project Page in Moode

Here is the Project Page in Moodle – private link

Here is my IT page in Moodle – again private link

Motivations
The main focus of our project group was to increase the student/staff usage of Moodle tools across the 2 campuses. To do this we ran 4 official workshop times, with a smattering of ’sandpit’ time thrown in.
Topics we explored in our group were:
* What kids like about online technologies
* How we might use the web to cater for different learning styles
* Using Rich media in Moodle
* Show and Tell session – still to come
General discussion showed that teachers understood and saw the benefit of online tools.
What people seemed to struggle with was finding the time to explore and put into practice what we talked about in our workshops.
Teacher example

Project member sample page

Personal Examples – Reflections on my own practice
Decided to jazz up a tired unit using videos from youtube. These were generally IT related ads and other funny stuff.
I setup a wiki where the students posted a response to a number of leading questions
Student Example

Struggles
Found that in a large number of cases, the students struggled with the open-endedness of the task.
Students are used to set questions with a specific answer, rather than a personal response to a stimulus.

In a wider sense, we are discovering that students have to ‘learn’ to adapt their thinking to work effectively with the new tools web2.0 is providing.
In future, I would ‘chip away’ at these tools throughout the year, perhaps setting up a similar activity early on with ‘right and wrong’ answers.
As the year progresses students can then adapt their process to include higher order thinking as the tasks become more open-ended.

Final Reflections
So really, from both a curriculum and student learning perspective, we have taken some small steps, but lots of walking yet to do.
Discoveries:
* At Flinders, we are now moving from just posting resources online, to introducing more widely tools where students are required to work collaboratively and think more independantly on a given topic.
* Teachers require time to work new ideas into their classroom processes
* A whole school approach probably works best – mandated change rather than ‘have a try at this’
* Students also need clear guidelines as to what is expected of them

David Williams: Professional Reflection

Motivation

ICA Casey College is in its third year of operation and one of the founding features was to be the development of a robotics program. The staff member who was to lead this unexpectedly left the College at the beginning of our second year. When the documentation from the AISV came through for the project I saw it as an ideal opportunity to use it as a launching point for our robotics program. However, my knowledge in this area was minimal but I took up the challenge regardless. I had good support in my colleague, Lyndal who had some experience in robotics.  

Intended goals / outcomes

Whole College:

• To establish a robotics program within the College.
• To have select staff participate in an introductory robotics professional development session.

Student: Through units in robotics students will

• further develop and apply their Mathematical, Scientific and ICT knowledge.
• further develop and apply the skills necessary for managing their personal learning and using thinking processes.

Personal:

• To develop the necessary knowledge and ability to set up and implement an introductory robotics unit.
• To improve my knowledge and ability in the area of ICT.

Description of the activity

Briefly describe the flow of the activity.  What did students do?  Where did it take place? What kinds of resources did they use?  What types of interactions did they have? etc.

I set up a WordPress Blog as a starting point for my Year Six unit in Robotics this term. The students accessed the Blog to engage with the initial task on the robotics page, which required them to click on a link to view a talk by Rodney Brooks, ‘Robots will invade our lives’ on the TED website. They were required to respond by developing a series of questions using our College’s Levels of Thinking as a guide.

The next stage of the task involved students working together to share their questions. From the Science page on the Blog they had to utilize the questions they created to develop further questions or adjust their original ones to outline a scientific investigation into the following topic: Robotics and artificial intelligence: enhancer of or threat to human existence? Investigate the use of robotics and artificial intelligence in history, industry, medicine, the military, literature and film.

This investigation task is currently implemented in support of the actual Lego Mindstorms robotics introductory unit in Science and Technology lessons. As other TED or online talks become available I add them to the robotics page on the blog for students to view and respond to. The intention is to further stimulate their investigation and also challenge them to think critically, analytically and be evaluative while engaging with the topic.

The unit on robotics was planned for this term. Therefore, my class is only just now beginning to engage with the blog. I am also using it for a staff presentation this week.

I have also created other pages in other Key Learning Areas where students can access materials and resources to assist and make their home learning more convenient.

Use of Online / Web 2 resources & tools

• WordPress.com: http://wordpress.com/
• TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Ideas Worth Spreading website http://www.ted.com/pages/view/id/5
• Pageflakes: http://www.pageflakes.com/default.aspx
• VELs Graphic Organisers: http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/support/graphic/index.html
• Exploratree: http://www.exploratree.org.uk/

Anecdotes from Design / Implementation

The original stimulus task set up on the blog to launch the robotics unit was a powerful one in that engaged the students and generated some good discussion. From there the whole class was able to develop their investigation task themselves through a think, pair, share process.

As I mentioned above this is now being implemented this term, therefore more time is required for students to engage with the blog.

Final Reflection

The beauty of the AGQTP PD was that it gave me an opportunity to take the time out of the everyday pleasures and difficulties of teaching, administration, counselling, negotiating, reprimanding, encouraging, investigating etc and participate in an enriching and challenging ICT course. I have never been proficient in ICT. This was a chance for me to learn some new skills to enhance my teaching and stimulate and improve my students learning. It also provided benefits for our College in regards to establishing the beginnings of our robotics program.

This allowed targeted staff to participate in the introductory Lego Mindstrorm Robotics PD. We also had opportunities to present and trial some of the Web 2.0 tools (WordPress & Nings) with staff in our own pedagogy development.

The two main struggles that I faced was more limited knowledge in this area (suffering vertigo while undertaking such a steep learning curve) and being able to devote the time that I needed and wanted between the AISV professional development days.  Knowing that we had a robotics unit planned for term 4 gave me a focal point to decide what exactly I would use and trial in relation to Web 2.0 tools. Once I began planning aspects of the unit I then was able to develop the blog as a part of the planning process.

In the process of investigating, researching and trialling the development of our own pedagogy in terms of technology at ICA Casey College and sharing our learning from the AGQTP AISV PD we have been debating the following issue or puzzle: Is the e-Principle (technology) a pedagogy or a learning tool?  Strong cases for both sides of the issue have been presented by staff at the College and we are yet to come to a consensus and reach a conclusion.

The insight gained for me personally, and I believe also for other staff, through the process of implementing ICT in the classroom and participating in our own developmental phase of our pedagogy trial at the College, is the challenge of preparing students for the future. They need to have initiative and be flexible and adaptable, critical thinkers and problem solvers, curious and imaginative, collaborators and leaders, analysers and evaluators of information and effective communicators in the oral and written form. These are the characteristics and dispositions required by students in order to develop their social, political, economic and environmental capital. The greater their capital, the greater are their opportunities and the better their resilience when facing the ever changing demands of the world around them.

This is no easy task. It requires a well researched and developed pedagogy with an emphasis on Literacy, Numeracy, Thinking, management of personal learning and ICT. It is dynamic and ever changing and evolving. It is like the elusive Holy Grail that one searches for but never quite reaches!

The following is the link to my Blog: http://williamsatcasey.wordpress.com/