Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Regina TLs Day of Learning: Anytime, Anywhere, Anyone: Transitioning Toward 21st Century Learning

Keynote Resources from: bit.ly/SaskTL


Anytime,Anywhere, Anyone (Resources) - #SaskTL

Dr. Alec Couros
couros@gmail.com
@courosa
skype: aleccouros
youtube.com/courosa

Websites in Order of Appearance:
  • About.Me - Alec’s About.Me page (as an example).
  • EC&I 831 - Open graduate course, “social media and open education”.
  • The Open Doctrine - My own personal attack ad (video).
  • Stephen Downes - Downes’ wise commentary on the Best Job in the World.


Standards/Background:
  • The Typical Teacher Network - This diagram attempts to visualize the typical network of teachers.
  • The Networked Teacher - Increasingly more teachers are developing rich personal learning networks (PLNs) through the use of social media (sometimes called Web 2.0 tools).
  • PLE Diagrams - Scott Leslie has compiled comprehensive list of individuals who have visualized their personal learning environme
  • nts.
  • What Does the Network Mean to You? - I asked the question of my network, "what does the network mean to you?". As a result, dozens of people responded via Voicethread (through text, audio, video) to explain their thoughts on networked learning and professional development.


Examples and Information About Open Courses

21st Century Learning in Practice (videos):

Communication/Networking Tools & Tutorials
  • Wikispaces (one of the most popular wiki tools, adfree for educators)
  • PBWorks (another popular wiki tool)
  • LinkedIn (important, career-based social networking tool)
  • Schoology (free learning management system, course communication/creation tool)
  • Posterous (very easy blogging/communication tool)
  • Tumblr (media-friendly blog platform)
  • Skype (most popular video/audio conferencing tool)
  • join.me (video/audio conferencing tool)
  • Tokbox (similar to skype but nothing to install, free for videoconferencing)
  • Chatzy (free private chat rooms)
  • TinyChat (live video chat rooms - beware of some inappropriate content)
  • Today’s Meet (easy to setup chat w/ tags)
  • WizIQ (virtual classroom for online teaching and learning)


Productivity & Collaboration Tools

Screencasting, Video, Photos, Audio
  • Jing (free software for screencasting and image capture)
  • Screenr (free, web-based software for creating screencasts)
  • Animoto (easy way to create engaging videos from your imagery)
  • Flickr (popular photo-sharing site, great for finding copyleft images)
  • Aviary (popular media-editing suite)
  • Jaycut (free video editing)
  • Handbrake (rip and pull DVDs (Mac)
  • KeepVid (download videos from Youtube & other sources)
  • Zamzar (online file conversion)
  • Lightworks (free video editing software for Windows)
  • PhotoStory 3 (story maker for Windows)
  • One True Media (create slideshows and share)
  • Soundcloud (audio hosting & embedding)
  • uStream (free live video streaming)
  • LiveStream (another free livestreaming service)
  • Blip.fm (social music service)
  • GrooveShark (social music service, allows shared playlists)
  • fd’s Flickr Toys (number of ‘toys’ for your images)


Presentation Tools
  • Prezi (popular alternative to Powerpoint)
  • Slideshare (great way to host slide decks & create screencasts)
  • Glogster (alternative presentation format tool)
  • 280Slides (similar to Powerpoint, but online)
  • SlideRocket (another popular Powerpoint alternative)
  • PhotoPeach (easy, sharable slideshows)
  • Wordle (easy way to create word clouds)
  • Tagul (another way to create word clouds)
  • Stupeflix (another slideshow creation tool)
  • Dipity (timeline creation tool)
  • Voki (creating talking avatars)
  • Xtranormal (create movies via text)
  • GoAnimate (create cartoons and animations easily)
  • Voicethread (create interactive presentations)
  • VuVox (create great presentations)


Collaborating Thinking/Writing Tools

Referencing/Attribution Tools
  • BibMe (online referencing tool)
  • EasyBib (another online referencing tool)
  • Plagium (plagiarism detection)
  • Zotero (great research tool for organization, citation, bibliographies)
  • Mendeley (a free reference manager and academic social network)


Polls & Surveys

Aggregators
  • Netvibes (personal, dashboard-like aggregator)
  • Symbaloo (another popular dashboard-like aggregator)
  • Weblist.me (easy way to quickly share links with visual interface- great for elementary)
  • Feedly (Browser plugin to aggregate RSS magazine-style)


Media Resources

More Resource Lists to Explore



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Friday, October 21, 2011

Wrestling with Assessment in the Digital Age

STF Conference, Finding our Way IV: Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability
Presentation by Joanna Sanders Bobiash and Erik Van Dusen

Here is our presentation from today's workshop about using digital tools for assessment. (Presentation Link)

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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Prime Minster's Awards for Teaching Excellence

Receiving my pin from
Prime Minister Steven Harper 
Last week, I had the honour of accepting the Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence in Ottawa. I am overwhelmed and still in shock that I have been recognized with such a prestigious award. I love my job and I do the work that I do because it is one of my passions. I would like to thank my nominators and supporters for putting my name forward as I know preparing a nomination package for this type of award is very time consuming. For more information about my award, please visit my biography and award description from the PMA's website.

Receiving my award
at the PMA's ceremony
In the fall of 2010, a parent of one of my students approached my principal to nominate me for this award based on the work that I had done during the 2009-10 school year. They worked as a team to put my name forward by collecting numerous letters of support from various colleagues and statements from students. Reading a copy of the nomination package after it was submitted was an honour in itself. I wish all of my colleagues could have a similar document written about their work as it is something that I will always treasure.

Along with a cash award that I will get to spend on my students and my professional development, my prize included a 6-day trip to Ottawa for the awards ceremony, a meeting with the Prime Minister, a group dialogue session with the Governor General, a presentation from a Canadian Astronaut and other events. Part of my week in Ottawa was spent participating in a two-day exemplary practices session with the other winners of this award. Here is the presentation that I made to my fellow recipients:
Prime Minister's Awards for Teaching Excellence Presentation
View more presentations from Joanna Sanders Bobiash

The award recipient this year are outstanding and it was a real privilege to get to know them during our week in Ottawa. I invite you to visit their biographies to check out what they are doing at their schools. There is also a great resource on the PMA website that includes descriptions and ideas about exemplary practices from this year (will be posted soon) and for previous years. I think it is a resource that isn't as well utilized as it could be and well worth the time to check it out.

Finally, if you know an outstanding Canadian educator who deserves recognition, please take the time to nominate them. The nominations are now open for the  2011-12 award.
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Thursday, September 8, 2011

How video in the classroom helps digitally-savvy students learn

Article from the Toronto Star
September 8, 2011 13:09:00
by Diana Mehta, The Canadian Press

Zara Cruickshank’s Grade 8 science class is a little different from those of yesteryear. Students regularly make mini films or podcasts for class projects, reams of notes are a thing of the past and video is an important part of learning.

As the new school year begins, a number of Canadian classrooms are increasingly implementing video as an educational tool to keep their digitally savvy students engaged and interested.

“It’s just easy to focus when it’s visual,” says Cruickshank. “You can be creative and have fun doing it because you’re putting your ideas together to make something for school, to make school easier.”

The 13-year-old at Regina’s Ecole Wilfrid Walker is talking specifically about Joanna Sanders Bobiash’s classroom.

Bobiash — who travelled to Seattle’s Google Teacher Academy this summer to brush up on her web and video skills at the first ever YouTube Teacher Studio — plans to use video a lot more extensively in her classroom this year.

“Everyone has different learning styles, they learn best in different ways,” she says. “Video provides the opportunity to almost deliver both (visuals and text) at the same time. You have visual, you could have written and you have audio at the same time and students can refer to them at their own pace.”

The days of classroom video consisting of a TV and VCR rolled in for a lengthy film students could zone out on are over. Bobiash, who teaches science and social studies, uses digital video to deliver information in short, interactive bursts and encourages students to make their own films for projects which can later be posted online through her YouTube channel.

“Before they could only express themselves in the written form, but now they can express themselves in different ways,” said the 35-year-old teacher. “They’re really drawn to video when doing research, it helps blend different learning styles better than just reading a bunch of text online.”
A concept that really struck her during her time at the Google Teacher Academy was what’s being referred to as “flip teaching.”

It’s when teachers film themselves explaining a concept, or assign an educational video and have the student watch it for homework so they’re actively thinking about the subject before it’s explored in class the following day.

Bobiash plans to implement more flip teaching at the start of her subject units because she finds students really benefit from the visual component.

“They’re not just being given text to memorize,” she says. “I would say they’re retaining the information better because they have to understand it.”

When that understanding is later demonstrated through class projects, Bobiash says her students often blow her away.

“They really get into what they want to know about and their ability to communicate that is phenomenal,” she says, adding that her students often produce videos she would have expected to see at a high-school level.

“It’s a big change in how education is being delivered,” she says of the video component. “It’s an actual shift in how we perceive education itself ... that more in-depth thinking is coming out in the curriculum more.”

Shelly Wright knows what Bobiash is talking about.

The high school teacher at Cornerstone Christian School in Moose Jaw, Sask., plans to use flip teaching in her classroom more extensively this year and says students respond remarkably well to video as part of their learning.

“My students really love it,” says Wright, adding that video really helps cater to multiple learning paces.

“You have kids who need to go over different pieces over and over, and for those kids, they can watch the video three or four times, they can stop it where it doesn’t make sense ... for students like that flip teaching is really powerful.”

This year, for the first time, her students will also have the option to hand in video labs in place of paper-based lab reports — the outlining of the hypothesis, process and evaluation will remain the same, but students can convey them via film if they want.

Students respond more enthusiastically to video for homework than reading a textbook, says Wright.

“You could have essentially world class experts teaching your kids, which is one of the exciting things about the flip classroom,” says the chemistry and biology teacher, adding that video also allows her to show students unstable experiments she wouldn’t be able to demonstrate in the classroom.

That’s not to say teachers are assigning videos for homework every night.

“You use it for very specific purposes and you don’t use it all the time,” Wright says. “Then you can take your time in class to do hands-on stuff so it actually makes sense to them.”

For Wright, video, when used in the right way, helps hone her students’ problem solving and negotiating skills as they grapple with concepts on their own.

“Video is the medium of the future,” she says. “With all the stuff there is today, there is the opportunity for school to be really exciting in ways that it hasn’t been in the past.”
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Wednesday, September 7, 2011

The Flipped Classroom

Here is an interesting infographic that explains what a "Flipped Classroom" looks like. The statistics are American, but I think the message is just as relevant in a Canadian classroom as it would be south of the border. What do you think of the concept? Have you considered using it in your own classroom?

The Flipped Classroom
Created by Knewton and Column Five Media
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