I have been checking out some of the other digital projects on students blogs. They are all very impressive. I made an Xtranormal movie for my summary of learning. I tweeted it out earlier today. I have also linked to my summary of learning and embedded it into the blog. One of them has to work!! Thanks again to everyone in the class for your guidance and contributions.
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The summaries of learning presented on Tuesday night were fantastic. I am blown away with the abilities of the students in this class. My hat is off to all of you that presented. I was surprised at all of the different types of presentations. Some of which I have seen before, but others I have only heard about. I would like to apologize to the community for the lack of constructive comments that I have offered. Many of you are light years ahead of me understanding the role of social media in education. I read many of your blog posts, but could offer little in the way of help as I was floundering my way through the course. I appreciated the comments left on my posts, you were all very helpful.
I am happy to say my final project is complete( kind of as I will explain shortly) and my own summary of learning is almost wrapped up. I have spent many an hour taping, and editing video. I have come to the point where I am efficient, not proficient, but efficient enough that having to edit is no longer paralyzingly frightening. With the help of a few guru’s at my school I have made great strides. My online PLN did not grow as many of yours have. I never seem to have trouble finding help with my questions. That may be why I have not developed my PLN. I seem to be physically surrounded by great, skilled people willing to share. I was having a conversation with a colleague in the staffroom about giving and receiving help from other teachers. She was expressing how she didn’t feel right asking other teachers for help, sometimes they wouldn’t or the price for help was too steep. I told her that I have never had that problem. She pointed out that of course I wouldn’t because I have lots to offer. I didn’t understand. She went on to explain that when I ask for help and someone helps me they knew that I would be able to return the favor because of my construction skills. Whereas some teachers don’t think they have any special skills that they can barter with. i had never thought of it that way before. To me it was simply if you can help then you help, if you know someone needs help then offer. Back to the project, as I was saying before I strayed off on a tangent. With the help of some great people I made the videos, created my very own youtube channel and uploaded the videos. I searched online for an acceptable(free) QR code generating program, assigned a code to each video, developed some signage for the machines and constructed the “phone booth”. The phone booth was a foreign concept to many of my students. They couldn’t understand why anyone would enter an “enclosed” space to talk on the phone. The videos are short lessons that “remind” students how to operate pieces of machinery, or perform other various tasks. At least that’s how I thought it would work. The students have other plans!! They come into class and ask what we are doing today then go and check the phone booth to see if there are any videos about the days topic. If there aren’t I certainly hear about it. They have even decided that maybe they should make some videos to help other students that are taking the class next semester (rhyzomatic learning or what??). And of course they all have advice. You should have taped it from this angle, it’s too quiet, or dark, your shirt is the wrong colour and on and on.
Now an explanation of why my final project is kind of finished. After uploading the videos to my youtube channel, as I was watching my daughter play basketball, I got an email on my phone. It’s youtube, trottr100 has subscribed to my channel. He’s what? Why? and who the heck is trottr100? An hour later it happens again. colinjenny100 has also become a subscriber, not only that but he/she/they leave a comment,” loved your video keep them coming.” What?? No, no, no I don’t do this these were just for an assignment for a university class and I wonder how did they even find my channel???? Then it hits me, I made all of the videos public. Dag nabbit, that Shareski strikes again!! And the story doesn’t end there, tomorrow I am off to another school to collaborate with another construction teacher about my project and how I used the codes in my class and shot the video. There may never be an end……….
I placed the QR codes(as a docx file) on my school website so my students and colleagues can get to it. I placed 3 QR codes directly on my home page as examples for all. If you have a smartphone and a QR code reader app such as Scanlife(which is the one I use) you can scan it right from the computer screen.
Although I found this class a ton of work I really enjoyed having to be immersed in social media, at least for a little while. This class has introduced me to a lot of great examples of different ways to use social media in education and how students are going to use new technologies to learn.
Thank you Alec for your patience.
This old dog learned a lot of new tricks.
Enjoy your sabbatical. P.S. like your son I also hate shopping.
Three guys walk into a pub. A physics teacher, a computer technology/ multimedia/ computer tech teacher and a construction teacher. They sit down and continue building their F2F PLN. As the waitress walks away the conversation turns to work. The C.P.T./M.M. teachers asks, “what do you guys know about twitter?” The physics teacher pipes up, “I do not have Twitter, from what I’ve heard it’s a waste of time. Who would care what I am doing for the weekend or what I think about the weather, I know I don’t want to know what everyone thinks about every minute of the day. Seems like a big waste of time filtering through a bunch of useless info. This is where the story gets weird. The C.P.T./M.M. teacher turns to the construction teachers and asks, “what do you know about Twitter?” The construction teacher replies,”well, two months ago I knew nothing about it, but since enrolling in ECI 831 I have found out quite a bit.A lot more then the CPT/MM teacher, that’s the punchline.
So we discussed the benefits and drawbacks to Twitter and how to organize all of the people that you are following with Tweetdeck. In the end the physics teacher was unconvinced that he needed to be a part of the Twitterverse. The CPT/ MM teacher on the other hand was intrigued and went home and started a Twitter account for his school and is using Twitter to relay information to students about events at the school ie. basketball tournament coming up, report card dates etc. As of yesterday there were only 4 followers ( one of which was me) but I’m sure the following will grow. We also discussed my QR code project and he was quite interested and is hoping to include a QR code on the posters that are printed advertising the basketball tournament. The QR code will take the people to a webpage that will contain the schedule as well as ongoing results, etc.Before my project I have had no experience shooting , editing, uploading video so it has been a steep learning curve. With the help of some of my students we shot a video describing the reason the project was useful. I told them what my project was about and they came up with the script. I let them have some fun with it and this is what they came up with.
After watching Alan Levine video 50 Ways to tell a Story I checked out some of the other videos on youtube. One of which was a video of a 12 year old kid showing how to make a shooting gun out of a pen. I was blown away, the video this kid made was great, obviously not his first. He just seemed so natural. After watching it I thought I really am out of touch with what kids are doing. Are all kids his age doing things like this? I have never seen my daughter do this kind of stuff, but I know they have nade some videos for school. Then I did a search on youtube for how to make a pen gun, I was shocked to again find hundreds of videos showing how to make a pen gun. This is stuff I really could have used as a kid!! As I said earlier I have been spending a lot of time editing video, it is going much quicker now, but still painfully slow even with the help of a multimedia student and teacher. I can imagined doing shooting it and editing it when I was 12!
Last night I was watching twitter in Tweetdeck and kept seeing #OWS in various tweets and retweets. Not knowing what the hashtag was I searched for it and eventually found out it stood for the Occupy Wall Street movement. As I watched the tweets coming in I was amazed at the speed at which they were coming through. It really was a torrential river of information coming from all over the world. The tweets were coming in so fast I coudn’t read them fast enough.
At the beginning of the class I was similar to the physics teacher, unconvinced that I needed to get involved in this technology. As the class has progressed I have “seen the light”. There is a use for social media in learning and teaching. I’m still not sure where I fit yet. But, I know there are lots of great people doing great things all over the world who are willing to share their knowledge at the click of a button.
This weeks class was presented by Dean Shareski. Having listened to his presentation and having watched his Sharing: The Moral Imperative I came to the obvious conclusion that he thinks online sharing is very important. I too believe that sharing is important. As teachers we share our knowledge everyday with our students. In departments with combine our knowledge and share it with others in the building. As staffs we again combine our knowledge and share it with communities. So why not become part of a global community and share with the world? Makes perfect sense.
I think Dean is passionate about digital sharing, and from what I understood from his Moral Imperative presentation almost fanatical about it. As a rookie in digital technology and sharing I find it hard to fully understand his passion. I find myself a user of the knowledge so far. I find what I need and extract it from the internet. It is a tool, one of many that I use in my daily life. I still value relationships built in face to face interaction. I find nurturing the fewer close personal relationships much more rewarding than spreading a wide net of loosely formed ties on the internet. But, as I write this another voice in my head says, yes but, even personal relationships were started by loosely formed ties that grew stronger. So you can see my struggle. I guess as a person I still struggle with how much time it takes to seek out and build PLN’s on the internet( for me is it a wise investment). I’m starting to come to grips with the fact that there are many things I will never learn, but usually if there is something I need to know I can usually find it.
I respectfully have to disagree with Dean that it is our obligation to share digitally. My obligation for sharing is firstly to my students, secondly to other teachers in my school and thirdly to people within my school district. If after I fulfill all my duties to those individuals then, I can choose to digitally share what I have learned with others. I would never refuse sharing with someone that needed help. But I don’t feel it is my responsibility to digitally share things I have done.
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“The edge is where we come right up against ourselves and what we can do and be. It is the boundary between where we are and where we grow, the place of comfortable discomfort, where all growing and healing happens. The edge is the point in every pose when you are still within your capacities but are challenging yourself to go just a little bit farther. Stepping up to this edge and daring to leap is how your break through and thus break with old ways of being.” Baron Baptiste
Last week we had a great presentation from Dave Cormier discussing his model of rhizomatic learning. At first listen I disagreed with much of what he was saying. After listening to the presentation a second and then a third time, he has convinced me of some valid points to his model. The “Why” of education is very important and I agree with Dave that all educators will never be able to agree on the “what” to teach. The normative for some will be quite different then for others. Dave admitted that he doesn’t know what skills will be needed in the future, I would agree many skills needed in the future are hard to pin down, but I believe that the skills needed in the future will have to be skills that are important in addition to the current skill we teach. Our students are going to have to learn more then we did as students. The workers that the education system previously produced will have to continue to be produced, most of the 7 billion people in the world are workers.(Is that because the education system made them that way or because that is what they want to be? Another question for another time, perhaps). To a certain degree I agree with Dave’s idea that I , as a teacher, am a soldier, but I am a soldier that works with other soldiers and workers to produce nomadic working soldiers.
So do we create nomads, or are all students nomadic and our current education system, stomps the creativity out of the nomads to create workers? I really appreciated the remarks Dave made about the structure necessary to create an environment where the nomads can flourish. As a construction teacher safety is a large everyday concern for me. Without long term plans that promote students to learn and master skills safely many nomads would learn lessons the hard way. My students are slowly encouraged to become(use their already exsisting) creative as they become more proficient with basic skills.This is where I create the space for nomadic learning.
I disagree, with Dave concerning the knowledge vs. memory part of the presentation. I think when we memorize things(master them), lets say for the sake of argument the times tables, it allows us the freedom to use our brains to solve more complex problems without struggling through the easy steps again and again. Do we really want our students growing up googling 6×7 every time they need to compute it? The point Dave made about the “real point of learning” or “isness”(Wynton Marsalis) really struck home with me. The moment that you see the look on a students face that shows he/she gets it, where the learning becomes part of them, something that they will never forget. As a teacher these, sometimes few and far between, moments are the most rewarding.
In my teaching I would like to think that I have an open syllabus. Or do I? Reflecting I think I give the students opportunities to be creative and learn different concepts at different times in different ways, but not until they are in grade 11 or 12. So does my teaching stifle them in grade 9 or 10, or is that when I build the relationships ( get to know what they need) and start to create the structure I think they need to become rhizomatic learners in grades 11 and 12?
Hmmm? Just more stuff to think about.
I just got a chance to listen to last weeks class again today. The more I learn the less I know. I did find a great site about twitter and how helpful it is to educators. If you are a newbie Class this week was similar to a presentation I saw Alec give at Balfour Collegiate on one of our PD days last spring. His presentation at Balfour was one of the reasons I took this class. Little did I know what I was getting myself into. I’m not a computer/social media person at all. I don’t have a Facebook account, had never used Twitter, rarely do I ever need to give a power point presentation. Teaching construction is a lot of hands on demonstrations then allowing the students to safely try and repeat the process and get similar results. I see the computer as a tool, one of many that I need to use to teach. Having seen the last 3 weeks of presentations I’m starting to see the bigger picture social media can bring to teachers and their classrooms.
For my project I am going to try and produce Youtube videos that my students, as well as other construction students can use at a touch of a button. My idea, which isn’t original by any means, is to create videos that will reteach students how to perform certain operations, link them to a QR code and have the students be able to watch the videos using their smart phones. This will cause me great stress, because currently I don’t allow cell phones in the shop, they are too distracting. I’m thinking of setting up a “cellphone booth” or station where cell phones are permitted, but only in that area. Thus, allowing students to use the technology, while also allowing them to be safe when using the hazardous equipment. I would love to hear any suggestions or criticisms anyone has for me.
A friend of mine tweeted this link to me earlier tonight. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/they_re_too_dumb_to_fail_gn9EItV0MWIDzK0lZCkpqJ It is an article about a school in NY that is changing the rules of grading students. I don’t find it a lot different then what I have been witnessing here in Regina. I would like to know if others agree or disagree?
It has been some time since I have sat down to blog. I have been trying to catch up on class content and trying out some new technology to get my major digital project up and running. So far it still feels like I’m trying to run in quicksand. So many other, more interesting (at least to me) things, to choose from rather then sitting in front of a computer typing. I have been reading many of the other students blogs, they all seem much more interesting. I have been watching a lot of Ted talks I find Ken(Sir) Robinson very interesting to listen to. I thought his comments about schools ruining students creativity hit the mark. His comments to the little girls mother about her being a dancer resonated with me. I see students in my classes all of the time that are very good at some aspects of the class, but very weak in others. My students are not dancers, but they could become craftsmen. Too many times I listen as colleagues discuss how we are going to increase the number of students going to post secondary education, as if that is the only reason for going to high school. Many of the students that I haved taught have gone on to become successful without going to universtiy, or college. I think we lose sight of the fact that not all students will attend university, or need to, to become successful. There are many paths that lead to success, some just have more twists and turns then others.
To everyone that helped with my picture problem, thanks for the advice. I’m still working on it.
underconstructionagain 