April 27, 2011 notes
The point is not just to use the curriculum as is, but to use the curriculum to get to all the effective instruction pieces.
How can we develop a good curriculum from this and develop this and change this as a community?
We will do more with Moodle in the May class & end of July
Remote learner—in the clouds (in case we don’t have a server for Moodle)
Can view the course by June
The curriculum is a starting point . . . for conversations
May 15 to complete assignments….
Involvement in leadership group/reflection & the giant reflection & research article
The e-learning class in May – will be sent out in today for how to register and what not
Etienne & Beverly ( 8:11 am) -- can we have a copy of the presentation?? Yes on the wiki
Community discovery activities were yesterday; today more community
design
Overview of the day. . . short video on elements of community self-design
A Community of practice is a self-governed learning partnership among people, who
share challenges, passion or interest
Domain, Community and Practice – components to learn together
Key processes/principles of a social discipline of learning
Inputs are
Reflect and self-design
Bring practice in
Create self-representation
Outputs are
Create public face
Push practice forward
Community shares: Identity, meaning, boundary, competence/power
Relationships and the building of trust are more important than the domain, but the domain will change things as well
Domain – the format and grouping
Community—those that identify with the domain
Practice – social learning system in which the practice itself is the learning
curriculum; a source of challenges and ideas; involves judgment, and
understanding
The practice needs to be expressible . . .
What is the reality of how things are now?
Don’t just talk about it and leave it where it is. Always trying to move things forward.
Where can we go from here to move it to where it needs to be?
Reflection -- important to the process to see where we have been, how we can move forward (Critical Friends)
Push practice forward (Agenda Activists)
Create self-representation (Social Reporters)
Create public face (External Messengers)
Interacting with the outside—as benefits the direction and needs of the
community
Learning activities—a great variety
1. Exchanges / Stories, tips, document sharing, information, news, pointers to resources2. Productive inquiries / Broadcast inquiry, exploring ideas, case clinics (fish bowl), project/after-action reviews
3. Building shared understanding / Hot topic discussions, debates, reading group, joint events, joint response
4. Producing assets / Documenting practice, collections, problem solving, learning projects, boundary collaboration
5. Creating standards / Mutual benchmark, warranting, external benchmark, models of practice
6. Formal access to knowledge / Formal practice transfer, Q & A, help desk, systematic scan, invited speaker, training and workshops
7. Visits / Field trips, guests, visits, practice fairs
Activities vary with whether or not they are formal or informal, outside sources or inside sources, from each other or with each other
(Interesting graphic thing . . . )
There may be communities of practice in the classroom, but they are not the classroom.
Students can express their membership to other communities of practice and this influences how they participate.
Useful to treat them as a community of practice!
Forms of participation (a common picture)—Core group, active, occasional, peripheral—just because they aren’t saying a lot doesn’t mean that they aren’t learning or identifying more than the active group, transactional
Silence doesn’t automatically mean disengagement.
Best leaders are those that have the community, even if no one else comes along. High energy in the leaders/core group
Healthy, active communities are not static—lots of dynamic change in levels of participation
Community of Practice is not just a network—my network of friends doesn’t have to have anything in common but me, but a community of practice has a common domain, vision, goal of practice; a network can be a starting point to develop a community of practice
Community rhythm –finding the heartbeat that is the right fit to keep the community going and thriving (varies with community and purpose)
Key dimensions to a social discipline of learning
The community serves you
Input from leadership (from within), membership, support (from outside), sponsorship
Community shares: meaning, identity, boundaries, competencies
to help the domain, community and practice learning together.
Contact info for Beverly and Etienne
http://BEtreat.net
http://social-learning-strategies.com
Self-organizing technique -- discuss topic and come up with a plan for how to address this . . .
Booth—key points and activities to come out of it . . .
Paige Keeley (one page assessment) -- ask Erica about…
Booth sessions—Reflection
would be good to have some sort of guiding questions…
How easy it is to come up with “action steps” that are general
strategies, but that aren’t specific enough to easily do
Doesn’t everything have an interpretation component?
Most posters were high on information, low on either
1. specific strategies
2. or how the specific strategy accomplishes the goal
We had general action steps, but they weren’t very prescriptive.
Booth thing is really effective for social learners
Or we discussed specific actions to accomplish our action steps, but wanted to generalize to make the poster a distillation of the process, so others could include other strategies—do students do this? Do they really understand specifics, but they want to make sure they don’t leave stuff out so they just give these really general answers?
And giving me specifics doesn’t necessarily tell me how it will look or work in my classroom. I need to take this information and the discussions and apply it to how I help students learn. (Maybe we shouldn’t be called teachers, we’re learning facilitators—but it’s more than that because we are supporting and scaffolding and modeling and guiding…. Maybe that was what the word teacher is supposed to encompass and it has been simplified in our culture to connote a conveyer of knowledge…)
Edmodo is a secure social network for teachers and students
Cacoo—user friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, etc.
Evan Abby (sp?) (12:43 pm) --- Lego, Rainbow, Necklace, Cake
What is Moodle as a mental model? May-June is good;
Moodle is the swiss-army knife of tools; lots of different things you can do
GSS feed, announcement, calendar, quiz, forum, wiki, lesson,
gradebook, blog, glossary, database
an effort to digitize the classroom interactions
Moodle is like legos—platform that comes with a great set of bricks; different foundations—courses; 4 categories of bricks:
1. store – content
- files
- webpage
- folders
- links
- portfolio
- labels
- LMS package
- Database
2. Communicate
- Chatrooms
- Forums (asynchronous)
- Many more
3. Evaluate
- Missed these
4. collaborate
- Wiki
- Blog
- Social network
- Missed this
Can plug Google apps in the Moodle; widgets that can be added in
Very functional
Why Moodle?
Provides common interface for sharing
Uses the full variety of tools
Has flexible plugins
Is supported by the AEAs
They will have webinars available for this also…
Open source as are Web 2.0 tools; need a dedicated server. Can provide temporary sandbox space for a couple of teachers for a course.
Easy to maintain as a server; can go on an already existing server…. AEAs can help out with setting this up; there are hosted options if school doesn’t want to do this….
What is blended learning?
RAINBOW -- spectrum starting at face-to-face and extending to fully online
Place to access files and links/ Digital dropbox
Self-guided lessons/ extra practice
Enrichment/classroom discussion board (extends class beyond the bell)
“Traditional” model (work online)/Flip Thinking model (Daniel Pink ??)
Constructivist model/connectivist model
PAUSE—What makes sense to your group now? What questions do you still have?
Beverly & Etienne
Inviting us to build community, working in multiple dimensions
Attempt to bring coherence to the multiple dimensions
Prepare a timeline for future to bring dimensions together in leadership groups; also
representing topic group and the whole group
What processes, etc. do we want to see happen July 27-28? (my notes of the process)
Email listserve
Discussion about infusing inquiry
Need to focus on product
Pacing needs to improve
Moodle needs to be used in the presentation/interaction that we use
Electricity and bandwidth
A differentiated moodle session at the beginning
AEA PD Online.org (link on bottom of wiki)
Technology Integration & Media (our e-curriculum class)
Blended online facilitation
Separate one for science
To help support online facilitation
Go through what it might look like in our class and discuss….
Then put in group and each pick a module and set up as you would
do it…
All the other skills are built in . . .
K-12 ecurriculum model – this is the curriculum
email about itsi-su thing (??? -- July25-29)
Adobe Connect monthly meetings – 1st Wednesday 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm max (archived sessions)
Start date: June 8th, 2011 (rest will be on 1st Wednesday)
Design team – planning July 28-29 day
Etienne –wrap-up session (semi-circle giant group)
Summaries and goals (where to) report out from each group’s leaders
Hopes/fears/etc.
Math – go through first 6 units before July; modeling of blended classroom
Conversations with administration about tech things . . .
About what kind of student that would like to “create”
Talk with tech sooner rather than later . . .
Communication with students and parents about what is going to happen . . .
Science – Monthly meetings via Adobe Connect; forums to set-up
-- have the course ready to go before the May 23 meeting
Gail W. --disequilibrium, progressing toward equilibrium – looking at them as what can I
now do (transformational perspective)
External Messenger – we need to archive our stories; community is very important!!
--these skills are not going to go away (blended environments)
Center for Teaching Quality – Barnett Barry
--teachers should be involved in crafting educational
--Institute for Teacherpreneurism (the lady who told me
about late nite labs)
English – what is our work as individuals, as a group
--continue to use the wikispace for conversations
--are we all on the same flight plan?
Variations, turbulence
--CoPi – we’re all in this with copilots
Social Studies – 1st time professional development has been directed at social studies
-- global citizenship unit
--exhaustive and energizing (they’re designing this as they go)
--project based learning
Expectations/hopes/etc. –and with responses from panel (3:04-3:30)
If need more tech support, refer to AEA tech dept.
Info to help get the community on board (to get tech to where it needs to be)
A powerpoint/thing crafted to address general needs and importance
Archive the valuable things that support digital learning.
ILO – Iowa Learning Online
#1 reason 1-1 doesn’t work is technology doesn’t work & #2 is PD (not how to use the
computer, but how to integrate as a teaching tool)
Newell-Fonda; Van Meter –1 to 1 districts
Community as an integral partner, not outreach . . .
AIW – Authentic Intellectual Work fits with this well (as far as what she can
see, but how to help admin people and AEA people to see)
Best practices for teaching for understanding (in all of this, we need to focus
on Best practices)
It’s not about ecurriculum or Iowa CORE, but about teaching for
understanding! TIME to collaborate and reflect.
GRID to align all the other initiatives – this is part of the big picture and
aligned with Iowa CORE
new perspective; catching others enthusiasm
Hold the vision and keep working toward it…