Musings - Just Learning

online collaborative learning

Archived Posts from this Category

September 30, 2007

Visionaries and Innovators from the Grassroots

Filed under: Education, social computing, web 2.0, educational technology, online collaborative learning — Administrator @ 11:04 am

In a very short compressed space of time of the last few days here in Charlottetown, I have met some cutting edge educators who are changing the face of education from the grassroots level.

Dr. Sandy McAuley is using the latest iteration of the former CSILE knowledge-building environment with his students at University of Prince Edward Island. He provided a demo of the environment for all of us to explore. It takes a sort of concept-map building approach to a content management system-like environment. While it has its limitations in being a very closed system, I particularly appreciated the tagging/keyword system that it uses. Another disadvantage, however, is that it is not possible to export the knowledge that is created there. Sandy worked with Scardamalia and Bereiter at OISE in the early 90’s developing and using the earliest iteration of CSILE up in the Canadian Arctic communities.

Sandy and I had a few conversations about whether new pedagogies were required to use the latest web 2.0 tools and environments or whether we were reinventing the wheel and ignoring the important research that has already been completed about the creation of knowledge and learning in online environments. As I have reflected upon my students’ conversations and multimedia products in the last few years, I have returned to the published research that has explored the benefits of online learning spaces. Much value has been documented along the way. On the other hand, it has remained in silos as web 2.0 tools and environments have proliferated in the last two years. Educators without any prior experience with online learning environments are discovering the tools and using them in very innovative ways. Accessibility to the research is sometimes prevented or not encouraged. There has been a huge disconnect between the teachers in the trenches and the researchers in the white towers. In the meantime, critics are quick to point out that little qualitative or quantitative research has been done on their use in the classroom. The fact that they have not been developed exclusively for the education domain makes them even more dubious. Those of us who see the benefits should draw upon the pioneers of online collaborative learning environments from the 1980’s and 90’s.

I also met the creator, Mike MacAdam, of Chuala, a language community and web-based pronunciation application that shows great promise for learners of other languages. My own son’s resistance to learning French could certainly be helped by this great tool.

Elana Langer was also at this conference as one of the presenters, but she also was with Dave Cormier from the beginning in creating the goals of the Living Archives. Besides being a videographer who will create a documentary about the project, she teaches in New York at SUNY and is also involved in the One Laptop Per Child program. Her involvement with the OLPC was what fascinated me in particular and I had an opportunity to have a couple of conversations with her about that. We actually audio-recorded our conversation in Dave’s pantry as he and Jeff were webcasting live in the living room!

The developers behind the XO (the machine for OLPC) have created a new platform for the machine (Sugar) which is based on a new pedagogical approach to education. Elana explains it much better than I can try, so you are invited to listen to the podcast (soon to be posted!). She has also agreed to come on to a WOW2 webcast on December 8th as our special guest, so tune in then to hear her live!

In the meantime, OLPC has just released an offer to purchase/give the XO laptop. For $400 a person will purchase a model of the XO and finance one to be sent to a developing nation. I am dying to see the XO for myself and play around with it to see how it can be used pedagogically in a school community.

Earlier this afternoon I was also able to help out with the WorldBridges videocast from Dave’s livingroom and then later capture a video interview with he and Jeff Lebow that will be featured in our WOW2 K12 Online conference presentation in about three weeks. Jeff Lebow’s vision for WorldBridges is more than 10 years old and it was fascinating and inspiring to hear his convictions and passion for webcasting at the grassroots level.

And, of course, we were all here in Charlottetown, PEI, to support the Living Archives Project which is a brainchild of Dave Cormier, who is himself also a visionary of education. Originally, he had wanted to use Second Life as the environment to support the project’s goal of student-created villages of digitized historical content. Due to the young ages of the student participants, he was not able to use SL so, undeterred, he has since discovered OpenSim. This program allows him to install and host the virtual world platform on his own server or even computer. Islands can be connected and disconnected with each other by user control. This provides him with a great deal more control and ownership over the project. The students appeared very enthusiastic when they saw the virtual world the other day. Students in Virginia also were invited to look over the virtual world and are watching this project carefully in the hope they can build their own world too!

September 29, 2007

Keynote to New Media Literacies Conference

Filed under: Education, web 2.0, educational technology, online collaborative learning, Blogging — Administrator @ 6:43 am

It is exciting to be here at the University of Prince Edward Island to participate in this conference. I am sitting at a “blogger’s table” with Harold Jarche, Sandy McAuley, and Stephen Downes with Dave Cormier and Jeff Lebow hovering the background. Will Richardson is delivering the keynote and he is going through it to demonstrate how the world is changing and the social technologies that are being used by students, teachers, ordinary folks and even politicians. He points out in particular how Obama is using social networking sites in order to promote his campaign. Physical space can be transcended and we can now have meaningful conversations with people around the world. Will makes the statement that model of journalism has to change - we can add our own information so easily so instantly. I really liked what he showed about how a teacher was using twitter to teach about the student uprising in Myanmar just two days ago. Students were able to view photos and videos of Burma within hours after the incidents took place.

Will also looks at how business is changing and shifting as they exploit these web 2.0 tools. His wiki page is worth exploring for the information he has collected there. He reminded us, too, of the digital divide still due to socioeconomic disparities.

I like the way Will shows off his blog as a place where HIS learning takes place. “It is a powerful learning network.” However, there is a disconnect between this kind of learning and what is going on in classrooms. He also shows off FanFiction and MySpace (not a good site - he shows it as a bad model of how young people are using such sites).

Will and I both twittered before his session that the conference could be found live at edtechtalk.com with an invitation to join. Within a few minutes three of my twitter peeps had come back to say they were following us - Graham Wegner in Australia, John Pederson in Minnesota, and Alice Wells in Maine. How cool is that?

I particularly appreciated how Will put a focus on the importance of AUDIENCE. This is often overlooked as having any pedagogical value for students, but I think it is one of the most powerful and compelling reasons we should be using web 2.0 tools and environments. I have said it before - I think all student-created material should be up online. However, this is based on the premise that the material has authentic value. He mentions three great Canadian educators who have been so innovative in creating new pedagogies around these tools - Clarence Fisher, Darren Kuropatwa and Konrad Glogowski - and I heartily concur.

He challenges us to be participatory together during these exciting times - and to build our own learning networks. We also need to be modeling our own learning to our students.

September 26, 2007

What!! This Presentation will be Videocasted??!! And other developments….

Filed under: Education, social computing, web 2.0, online collaborative learning — Administrator @ 1:31 pm

Little did I know, some 11 or 12 months ago when I first heard of the proposal for the Living Archive project (yes, I made a few editing suggestions to the grant proposal - really, nothing much!) that I would be heading off to Charlottetown to participate in a conference to help carry out the goals of the project!

Kudos to Dave Cormier for pulling off a seemingly impossible and daunting task of a project - having young students collect and digitize content that would later be reconstructed in a virtual world (very short summary!)! It is student-driven social constructivism at its very best in concept.

I am honoured to be a part of the New Media Literacies Institute taking place at the University of Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown, PEI) Sept. 28-30th. Other (much more) notables include Jeff Lebow and Will Richardson.

What they *didn’t* tell me was that the presentations would be videocasted! And that Stephen Downes would be there. Okay, now I am a little … intimidated. Please note that both Will and Jeff are presenting simultaneously to me (phew!) and make your own choices!

This week I was able to finally finish and post the teaser videos to my K12 Online presentations. Please note that Vince takes most of the credit for our teaser on professional development. It was his idea for the scenario and he provided most of the slides for the opening and closing of the video. He also had a fun time screen capturing and editing together all the bits in movie-maker - a new experience for him.

See you all in PEI, Canada!

September 18, 2007

The 5 Cs of the 1:1 Laptop Environment

Filed under: Education, social computing, web 2.0, online collaborative learning — Administrator @ 5:10 pm

The 5 Cs of the 1:1 Laptop Environment

This conviction about the 5 Cs of the 1:1 Laptop Environment came to me when I was in New Brunswick last month making a presentation to teachers who were teaching to students who had just been given laptops. It comes from my own observations from teaching with the use of laptop myself for the last four years and in being in a 1:1 environment for two years.

Tonight I listened to Gary Stager’s presentation at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai (care of Wes Fryer) just last week. I agreed with MOST of his presentation. He stated that the most important activity the laptop permits is that of construction (creation). It is certainly a very important goal within that environment and, as a social constructivist who has been inspired by the work of David Jonassen, I would agree that this is an important goal in a 1:1 environment.

However, I would say that given today’s super-powered Internet tools and environments, that while we educators have done a fairly good job of fostering the ability to collate, create and construct, we have NOT done such a good job at providing opportunities to communicate and collaborate given a ubiquitous wireless environment which always accompanies a laptop environment. (I realize I somehow left out connect, but that sense is there, I think!)

It drove me CRAZY in the last few years that we would inflict digitally-based projects on our students, they would submit them (often over the built-in email service), we would evaluate them, and poof! that was it, they were gone. Unless the student self-consciously saved their projects themselves, usually the project was doomed to be flushed out at the end of the year because the server space needed reclaiming. No vision for sharing that project with a larger audience or preserving it as a portfolio artifact for the future. No sense of reflection about progress over a period of time. No idea that another audience existed who could benefit from this constructed knowledge.

I also believe there is a great deal of value in socially-constructed knowledge and even better if the collaboration has to include a distance education component to it. Many of our 21st Century learners will have to do this as part of their future education or employment - or just for pleasure.

I would love to hear from other educators about *their* opinions on this issue!

September 12, 2007

Let’s Go Global!

Filed under: Education, web 2.0, online collaborative learning, Blogging, women of web 2.0 — Administrator @ 9:41 am

Last night on our WOW2 webcast, we had an impressive set of teachers with us to describe their plans and involvement in global projects for this academic year. Kristin Hokanson was effusive in her enthusiasm for using web 2.0 tools and getting teachers connected and involved. Her “Connected Classroom” wiki is very impressive - check out the video she has embedded in it.

Cheryl Lykowski, with whom I have been corresponding for a few months now, has just won an award for her impressive work on a master’s thesis project involving her students (in Michigan) in a podcast project with teachers and students in Colombia.

Another teacher whom I had invited, but was not able to join us last night, is Jennifer Meagher, a teacher who involved her Sherbrooke Québec high school students in a collaborative project with teachers and students in Uganda using the tools and environment from TakingITGlobal. Although she has since moved to another province in Canada, she is an enthusiastic proponent of global partnerships and knows of several classes around the world that are seeking partners this year.

While on the local level in my own setting I know of few teachers who are flattening their classroom walls to communicate and collaborate with students outside of their immediate environment, I am encouraged that this is changing. Opportunities for global collaborative projects abound and the tools of the Internet have never been easier to use!

Other projects/portals worth mentioning: Life Round Here (by Chris Craft), The Global Education Ning, and Teachers Without Borders.

IMPORTANT!!! If you have a great project that has used WEB 2.0 TOOLS, Terry Freedman asks that you would fill out this form so he can show off best practices examples with the upcoming Coming of Age - 2nd Edition. Please consider doing so - this way we can all share our students’ great work using these neato tools.

Below is a slideshow of a presentation I recently gave at the Literacy and Learning in the 21st Century conference in New Brunswick. I include slides of my own three teenagers who each use the Internet in very different ways - yet in ways that I believe are typical of our generation of youth today. All three of them are using tools and environments which permit them to collaborate and share with others not in their own immediate location. I included them in my presentation to demonstrate how teenagers are using the Internet as a means of communication and collaboration OUTSIDE of educational purposes. They do so easily and naturally, not because they are “geeks” (they would quickly cringe at that label!), but because that is how today’s teens are having fun and getting connected with their friends.

Check out the other portals mentioned in the slideshow if you are looking for an Internet Project or Global Partnership this year!


September 4, 2007

Blogging - Not IF, But When, Where, and Why

Filed under: Education, web 2.0, online collaborative learning, Blogging, women of web 2.0 — Administrator @ 9:25 am

It has been much too long since my last blog post. When I lamented how far behind I felt in my writing recently to a friend, she wisely pointed out that my “life stress score” was probably pretty high. She went through the list - kitchen renovation, two parents and nephew in hospital, hosting a big family reunion, child leaving home for university, change of job, change of routine….. okay, okay!! I have been a little busier than usual in the last few months!

I don’t feel particularly stressed - everyone is now healing nicely, the kitchen reno went well, the family reunion was a big success and it looks as though I am going to thrive in my new job at LEARN. But there are times, recently, when I have found myself overwhelmed into paralysis.

Today, Dave Cormier asked me to read over his blog which is also a part of a presentation at the University of Prince Edward Island. It is a terrific post/presentation and should provide some good material for those of you who may have to make similar presentations. I decided to comment and the ideas just flowed out like a dam had broken.

Here is what I wrote:

    A great presentation/blog, Dave! I liked your visuals and the embedded slideshow as well.

    I have a few more thoughts about blogging for educational purposes - not if, but when, where and why, as well.

    I used blogs with my high school students for the last three years in a variety of ways. As an English teacher, I am always looking for ways for my students to produce writing in authentic situations. Most of us are reluctant writers to begin with, so writing purposefully for a real audience makes a big difference in motivation and effort on the part of students. For the most part, traditional samples of writing would have an audience of one (the teacher), maybe two (if the student actually proof-read it!). With a blogging environment, the audience can be larger than just the members of the class. However, I have found that my students would *prefer* to write for an anonymous audience over their own peers - so powerful is the social force of peer groups in the teenage years! What I also discovered consistently over the three year period, was that the quality of writing improved greatly both between samples handed in for only my eyes and over time.

    This was due, I believe, to a number of factors. First of all, the students were exposed to the quality of writing by the rest of the students. Suddenly the bar was raised. They could see for themselves what was good and mediocre (and just plain awful) writing. The students who perceived themselves as not quite doing a great job put a good deal more effort and care into their writing. I almost couldn’t believe the quality I was witnessing from some of those students! As well, they were also aware that they themselves now had an audience. This also motivated them to perform at their best.

    Last year, I asked the headmaster of our school to read my students’ blog posts - at times in response to his weekly address - and he agreed. The very fact that the students were aware that the headmaster was going to read their blog posts also motivated them to really dig deep and write critically and thoughtfully. I was very impressed with much of what they had to say.

    So when we talk about using online social spaces - such as blog or wikis - for communicating for educational purposes, I would have to say a very compelling reason is because of authentic audience.

    I am very impressed with the new Québec Education Program that has now been completed in its mandate to provide a new curricula for the students of Quebec in the 21st Century. It explicitly states that the notion of text is no longer bound by words on a page (be it webpage or hard copy) but we now read other texts for meaning - visual texts, audio texts, multimedia texts. Literacy is now about making meaning from all available texts. Most blogging and wiki environments permit these texts (as you have shown on this blog post with your visuals and slideshow) to habitate all in one location in order to foster meaning-making for its audiences. Our students exist in a world where they are saturated with these texts. They have themselves become the producers also of these texts. I believe it is fundamentally important that we give them opportunities to produce content in meaningful, yet appropriate ways. This is another very important reason we educators should be using these tools and environments within the scope of our instruction.

    I have also been blogging myself - though certainly not daily - for the last two years. I took it on as a way to prime the pump for my own thesis writing for a graduate degree. The discipline of blog writing has given me back much more than that. I have connected with educators I had no idea were out there. In fact, I am still surprised when someone says they are following my blog! The notion of an authentic audience who reads what I write is a powerful motivator; however, with it comes a responsibility of care for what I write and about whom. I work very hard not to betray the trust of my friends and colleagues as I write. It is very important to play nice and play fair when you are putting your thoughts “out there” on the Internet. This is about digital ethics - something I don’t believe we teach enough to our students. As they become producers of content, it gives them an opportunity to experience ownership of ideas - perhaps through this, it will give them a sense of the importance of copyright and avoiding plagiarism.

    Thanks for giving me a chance, Dave, to thrash through some of my ideas and beliefs about the uses of blogging in education!

Some of the above ideas are greatly influenced by Dave Warlick who presented at a conference I attended a few weeks ago. We are crossing our fingers that he will be able to be our keynote speaker at a conference in Montréal in February!

Tonight on our WOW2 webcast we have a number of really terrific special guests lined up for a “super admin” show - Dr. Scott McLeod, Barbara Barreda, Chris Lehmann and Miguel Guhlin. Please join us at 9 PM EDT on edtechtalk - who just moved to a new server yesterday!

July 19, 2007

Über-bloggers and even more reports on BLC

Filed under: ICT issues, Education, social computing, web 2.0, educational technology, online collaborative learning — Administrator @ 11:59 am

While I have been here at BLC, I have watched the evolution of the über-blogger. This term refers to those bloggers who are no longer satisfied with merely taking notes for a later blog post, or even blogging on the fly. No, bloggers have now found each other. They have moved beyond the private experience of writing their own takes on the sessions to the social experience of back-channeling the sessions using either skype or twitter. I was invited into a skype conference with several bloggers who were either onsite (even sitting next to me) or were vicariously experiencing the conference through the collective notes of the attendees. David Jakes has been sharing some of these skype conference chats. I think this practice is another development that has arisen out of the Bloggers’ Café phenom of NECC 2007. To me, it is is a very valuable learning opportunity (that even our own students should be encouraged to use). We learn more through the collective experience in the moment than by writing our own thoughts, then asynchronously responding later.

More session reports:

Joyce Valenza - School Library Websites: State of the Art Information Landscapes for 21st Century Learners (audio-recorded)

Joyce is a tremendously passionate and dynamic speaker and presenter and her session included a wealth of perspective and resources. I found her paradigm of using student pathfinders (wiki-based resource pages) to organize a library webpage to be very appealing.

Her notes and resources can be found on the schoollibrarywebsites wiki.

She believes it is no longer an option for a school to not have a library website - it is a MUST for our 21st century students.

Ewan McIntosh - “We’re Adopting” - An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in Education (audio-recorded)

Five point strategy:

identify key user groups
identify and understand your key users and influencers
let key users evangelise
turn evangelists into trainers

emergent behaviours

lead by example
lead by reminding
provide adequate support
lead by mandate (never had to do this)
personal and school benefits complement each other

It’s not about the tech, it’s about the teach.

More Notes from BLC

Filed under: Education, social computing, web 2.0, online collaborative learning — Administrator @ 11:35 am

I am seeing a recurring theme here at BLC. In the last month before I left school, I said something very radical, but what made a lot of sense to me. I have becoming convinced that we should be putting all our students’ products and projects online. Everything. Essays, multimedia projects, photos of that which could not be made digital. I got some strange looks from the senior administrators, although no one responded.

And so here I am listening to stellar presenters from around the world who are demonstrating best practices and showing amazing student work - all posted online. What are they using? Flickr, youtube, meebo, podcastpeople, the list goes on. The value of sharing online is now becoming widely recognized. However, I would say we are not yet at a critical mass.

More session reports:

Bob Sprankle - Podcasting with Purpose - (audio-recorded)

Benefits for Writing (podcasts)

Students Decide
Peer Teaching
Guiding Questions from Teacher
Team Writing Benefits

Research Skills
Teaching Others

Purpose to work - Podcasting creates purpose - relevance, audience

(So the wind won’t blow it away) creates artifacts to return to

podcasts can be part of living portfolio

writing for a global audience

George Lucas says we have to do away with learning in isolation

information literacy, relevant learning, global communication

Great to hear Cheryl Oakes’ voice during this presentation = great interview with real elementary students!

self-directed learning - students are very self-aware.

These teachers have let go of the control of their class and their students and permitted students to create their own ideas for podcasts -

Bob mentions - A whole new mind - mentions the importance of “design” - podcasting fits this need

He also mentions The Book of Learning and Forgetting - now on my book list.

We learn from the company we keep - quote from book.

What podcasts are we listening to? What blogs are we reading?

Teachers and learners become information artisans - DAve Warlick

Bob says that artisans today are the blog writers

Bob describes the instance of his class with the wikipedia lesson that Dave Warlick shows off at a presentation/blog - someone challenged the lesson - students respond - the process is iterative

The Medium is the Message - how podcasting has changed us - more personal

digital world - two kinds of people - producers and consumers - power will go to producers - quote from an adult visitor to room 208

Data - does the data show learning gains? Watch what they are doing - when they are teaching what they ahve learned - they are showing that something is happening.

Ewan McIntosh - Is your public body public? (audio-recorded)

identity 2.0??

The kind of spaces we have:

Secret Spaces - Mobile sms im

Group Spaces - beebo, facebook, tagged

Publishing Spaces - livejournal, blogger,flickr, phtobucket

Performing space - secondlife, world of warcraft, f2f in school

Participation Space - marches, meetings, markets, conferences

Watching Spaces - television, gigs, theatre, youtube

how implicit or explicit is your digital life?

(forced to write this) things I like:

citrus scents, summer days, a clean house, driving along the lake

Things I don’t like:

being late, paying bills, running out of milk for coffee

I work on creating curriculum and sharing ideas with educators - I also look after the needs of three teenagers and a busy household.

viral success cannot be planned

fear: always loathing?? - school 2.0 not happening because educators are afraid of trying it out -

love the fear, don’t loathe the fear

overplanning - room for serendipity, are you allowed and able to fail?

do you allow students, teachers to make mistakes??

why bother?? 2007 - this is the year that 16 year olds were born in teh same year as the web browser

are we ready for this? something has changed, we have to change

Will ICT have any impact - where has it made the biggest impact?

emerging technologies make the biggest impact - IWB’s has less impact on than when implemented 5 years ago

word count of - CDs = 0

emerging practieces - ways to share it all - make the biggest impact

ways to share it all - ie blogs??

don’t incriminate yourself - just don’t speak

take the 5th amendment - influence of the blog

bloggers are flattening out

wikis - another way for teachers to share it all

shares a wiki with what teachers created best practice guidelines for staff blogs

blogs are conversations - so converse!

who do you consult? roman army or wirearchy

track them - see what people are saying about ..you, your conference, your org

finding bottom-up culture; losing permissions-based culture

don’t do a me-too! look at your own cultural context, why they don’t accept the way things are (for me - what is it about Québec? )

do you want everyone to blog? why? examine why you want these tools

he likes very social public body

opens doors to a communicative body - a connected public body

May 18, 2007

Project Awards and Big Changes

Filed under: Education, online collaborative learning, women of web 2.0, NECC 2007 — Administrator @ 12:24 pm

I am so thrilled to announce that my students have captured TWO awards for their contributions to collaborative online projects with global partners.

Two weeks ago, I learned that our entry for the Global Virtual Classroom website design contest, Immortals and Heroes of the World had been awarded the second place silver award for outstanding website design. My grade 7 students were absolutely delighted by their recognition for work well done. We had terrific partners at Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park, Illinois (Janet Barnstable - teacher) and Santan Junior High School in Chandler, Arizona (Shaun Creighton - teacher).

Yesterday, I received word that my grade nine students’ international collaborative literature project, From Jerusalem to Montréal, was awarded second place for the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) (Special Interest Group - Telelearning) Online Learning Award. My partners for that project (not quite finished) are Karen Guth and for the fourth consecutive year, my very good friend, Reuven Werber.

Students in my English class have been participating in this international collaborative literature exchange with students at Neveh Channah School in Israel since last October. They have shared literature about Montréal to the Israeli students while also studying some literature based on Jerusalem. The LCC students were also asked to perform peer reviews on the research projects by the Israeli students. Videos and personal reflections about the literature were also exchanged.

This project will be on display at the upcoming National Educational Computing Conference in Atlanta at the end of June.

My students have worked very hard on these projects and I am so proud of them.

I am pleased to share that the first place award for the ISTE Online Learning Award goes to the very deserving Flat Classroom Project headed up by Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis. Congratulations to both of them and their students! Well done!

These awards have come at an important moment in my career as I have had to make a very difficult decision to leave my current teaching position at Lower Canada College (the best school in the world) and accept a position with LEARN Québec, an educational foundation associated with the ministry of education here in Québec. While I am very sad to leave behind my wonderful, amazing students, I am excited with the potential of my new job at LEARN.

More to come on that later….

April 29, 2007

The Three Cs of the Interactive Internet: Content, Construction, and Collaboration

Filed under: Education, social computing, web 2.0, online collaborative learning, Blogging — Administrator @ 2:29 pm

It has been a busy two weeks with three conference presentations on top of regular full-time teaching. I am very thankful that my school so graciously supports me in my forays outside the school walls. Two of the conferences were local to Montréal - the Quebec Association of Independent Schools Symposium and Springboards 2007 - English Language Arts conference. After months of much online conference involvement, the face-to-face conferences were refreshing and I was impressed with the calibre of presentations. Just as I prefer the blended approach to education, I can see that there is much value of having both online and face-to-face opportunities to communicate, interact and be presented with new ideas. I will be reflecting for some time to come on the new people and ideas from these events.

The Springboards 2007 Language Arts conference left me very impressed with some of the collaborative projects I witnessed. While they were not online collaborative projects, they were rich in multimedia use and fantastic opportunities for students to share their voices and tell their stories for a larger audience. Particularly impressive was the project that led to the publication of the book - Québec Roots: The Place Where I Live. The book is just beautiful with photography and writing from young students. It included writing from the Inuit children in the far north and shared a culture with which so many of us know so little. What a wonderful opportunity! I thought about how easy it would be for other sets of schools to do something similar - then use a tool like Lulu press to create their own publication to share in the school libraries and classrooms.

The first of my presentations was a collaboration with Scott Morrison (of Selwyn House School) and was called The Three Cs of the Interactive Internet. The wiki documents conversations Scott and I had about web 2.0 tools and their usefulness in the classroom and the pedagogy we have been using. Scott defends his dislike of the term web 2.0 - I have heard many who don’t care for the term. However, I continue to use it just because it has become so common.

I housed the next presentations on the same wiki - Listening to the Voices: Student Empowerment Beyond the Classroom Walls and reused much of the same material. The main points of the presentation were created on a slideshow web application called spresent which can then be embedded in the wiki. This way all of my content was readily available either on the slideshow or on another page on the wiki. It also left a wonderful artefact for others to go through later.

In particular, I wanted to demonstrate why web 2.0 tools should be used in education and what standards and curricular goals they meet both at our provincial level and the international level. It is so important to be aware of meeting curricular standards, especially when new tools and environments are involved. And, of course, I wanted to demonstrate the learning gains of my own students as they participated in authentic complex learning situations - many of them crossing cultures.

When I was in Mississauga at the Canadian Assoc. of Independent Schools Best Practices’ Conference, I was especially pleased to attend Konrad Glogowski’s presentation about using personal learning environments for teacher professional development. In essence, he examined a number of web 2.0 tools that facilitate professional growth for teachers. I followed his presentation and dove-tailed the discussion about the necessity of web 2.0 tools for education. We made a great tag team!

I later was able to record a conversation with Konrad about his PhD research of blogging in the classroom (please excuse the poor audio quality - we sound as if we are under water!). He described the qualitative study he had undertaken with his grade 8 students using a grounded theory approach. Teachers who are using blogging as a writing tool/environment in the classroom will want to hear his thoughts and reflections! Clearly it was a transformational experience for his students, but especially for Konrad’s ideas of the role of the teacher in a blogging community. I want to thank him for the conversation and hope it will enrich others.

— Next Page »