It’s a joy to be back at the QSITE conference where I’ve had the pleasure to keynote several times. Because the most recent was 2007, I’m looking forward to sharing how strategies like The Edge-ucators Way and CEQ•ALL have blossomed into NextEraEd. By the way, QSITE is the Queensland Society for Information Technology in Education and my sessions are on September 29 at St Aidan’s Anglican Girls’ School, south of Brisbane.
The Edge-ucators Way
Look to Learn
Samples
- Miniature Earth
- VisionShift: Whose Future?
- “I Can”
- Nuclear Giving
- There’s Data in them ther Kids (cartoon)
- The Global Rich List (interactive site)
Resources
- Look to Learn – overview
- Look to Learn Web site
- Look to Learn Sample Prompts
- Thinking Routines overview
- Thinking Routines from the Visible Thinking team at Harvard
Interaction: Comment on this Post: how could you use / support Look to Learns?
ClassPortals
References:
For Ideas & Inspiration
- OXFAM – Reshaping our World – Poverty Maps
- Idea Index from the Buckminster Fuller Challenge
- The Girl who Silenced the U.N. for Five Minutes
- Online Fundraising Efforts at Razoo
- 50 Items That Should Change the World
Interaction: Brainstorm Topics you think would make good ClassPortals
WebQuests
WebQuests by Tom
- Freedom Fighter or Terrorist?
- Tuskegee Tragedy
- CroolZone – School Safety WebQuest
- Does the Tiger Eat her Cubs?
Resources
- Detailed Process for Drafting a WebQuest (doc)
- Tom’s Current WebQuest 2.0 Process (pdf)
- Use the article above and the Designing a WebQuest 2.0 (doc) and the links below as a guide.
- Freedom Fighter or Terrorist Group Scaffold Sheet (you can modify)
Articles
- Tom’s Educational Leadership article: The Learning Power of WebQuests
- Tom’s longer version: What WebQuests Are (Really).
- Bernie weighing in on “Real WebQuests”
Interaction: Brainstorm Topics / Big Questions for possible WebQuests (Group 1 & Group 2)
Self-managed Learning Framework for students
C E Q • A LL / Seek all!
- Overview / Rationale
- Profiles (pdf)
- Rubric (pdf)
Interaction: ClassBubbles to share your thoughts (use key: nexteraed)
Activity: Creating Your Smart Online Space
- Complete 2 Day Workshop Handouts
- Get a WordPress Blog
- Change the theme
- Make a Post
- Embed YouTube (remember &rel=0)
- Try TubeChop.com
- Get Firefox for extensions like the video downloader?
- Embed all kinds of media in WordPress (maps, images, documents or polls?)
- A practice post with embeds
Activity – Web 2 Tools
- Download the Web 2 Tools Overview handout
- Copy and Paste the Tools Panel into a page for your site
- Choose from different Web 2 icons
- Go to Tom’s full workshop site
This collection is making me think about how I am currently packaging and distributing materials on our portal – I like the clean – uncluttered lines – each resource isolated with thinking points AND always the opportunity to contribute.
I tend to “clutter” lots of bits together in a “unit” rather than giving space for “thinking” and “interacting”….
So I think I can improve on the thinking routines to support “Look and Learn”. Appreciate your resource sharing.
By using them to encourage students to think deeply about the images and videos being presented to them.
Seems a good way to get kids to reflect more – a key skill that they’re not always keen to do. The more practise – hopefully the better they’ll become.
I use many “Look to Learns” but am sometimes guilty of showing resources (passive and interactive) but not prompting enough thought and discussion about the resource. It’s good to be reminded about these things.
Start with the teachers and introduce the idea to them. Let those interested run with it and try it in their classrooms. Feedback to group about successes/not quite successful.
I like this idea of using with staff group…will try this one!
Look to learn is an interesting way to get students to think beyond the surface of a presentation/video – if the stimulus questions are pointed, open-ended and not what they were expecting then the impact of this strategy could be profound.
The KEY would be to follow it up with a related activity to frurther connect the ideas surfaces and contextualise them in a different scenario
I’d like to adapt it to use with Maths and estimating/comparing volumes of shapes.
Look To Learn could be used within my school as stimulis material for the start of lessons. A quick few minutes for access-view-discussion would be time well spent. It would also buy time for fixing those inevitable technology problems.
Look2Learn Sample prompts can be used to encourage higher order thinking routines for students. When teaching web design skills students can be encouraged to analyse and evaluate the layout of their favourite website or a top ten website and gain insight into what makes the webpage successful. This can then be linked in with what they learn about web design theory and used to enhance their own website designs.
I am starting to introduce Habits of Mind across my school. I think the mechanisms you suggest are useful as ways of engaging in the kids in explicitly teaching the habits. Eventually the HoM will be embedded in teachers mainstream curriculum but I have a Year 9 class for ‘personal development’ that I use to practice (experiment).
Alex, Habits of Mind is my favourite part of the Dimensions of Learning Framework – powerful stuff and important in metacognition
I want to develop online collaborative projects for middle years science students in order for them to engage in “real” learning tasks. It will be helpful for them to be able to access suitable rich stimilus material and be able to contribute to discussions. I was planning of using Moodle to provide a base. Pulling in material from places like will be really helpful.
I would like to have students create content for stimulus for a topic to challenge and engage other students.
Great to use to start students actually become familiar with what ‘thinking’ feels like.