We are supposed to make a final reflection on our course and in some way this implies to me that things are finished whereas they feel like they are just starting.

I have enjoyed this course for so many reasons that I dont know where to start really. So I am not going to bother. Instead I have opted for a wee list of all the ongoing things that I am involved with which I most likely wouldn’t be had it not been for the course.

1. My students all create collaborative notes as opposed to individual notes using a wiki as the platform (even higher level IB)

2. I am creating a new fieldwork trip for grade 9 and am again using the wiki as a platform for other teachers in the dept to review and edit the plan before i share it with all of next years grade 9 students. (teachers haven’t yet seen it!)

3. I have created a personal learning network of IB geo teachers who I met at a level 3 (they are much more experienced than me) IB course during the spring break. We are focussed on developing schemes of work together (new IB syllabus next year) and looking at ways in which our students can collaborate.

4. The Pecha Kucha idea for the religion class (see below). Julie Lindsay got back to me today to say that she is up for it )

5. I have a blog which is motivating me to reflect from time to time and I am increasingly seeing it as a sophisticated CV

6. I read other teachers blogs (great people from our school who I would most likely have never met and inspiring individuals who teach my subjects or are just interesting thinkers)

Things are just beginning not ending.

I am just not that into Blogging at the moment.

I am sure that I will get back on it some time in the future but the instant gratification of trying new ideas with my classes is far more appealing and more immediately relevant to me just now.

Now that I have learned lots of new cool tools and have been inspired by the creativity of others I want to put my ideas into practice. If Blogging is primarily about reflection then maybe I am not yet really ready for reflection.

I have loved participating in our webtech masters course and am certain that I will pursue many of the strategies that we have been introduced to. I am certainly hooked on the idea of creating more meaningful experiences for my students and the use of web technology is, to me, unarguably an effective means of creating such experiences.

As for now, and maybe forever, I would far rather let the students experiences do the talking.

After being introduced to the wonders of Pecha Kucha presentations on our masters course, and having seen how effective they can be in our class presentations, I decided to give it a bash with my students.

Getting to the point is a hard thing to do for some students whereas for others saying anything in front of an audience is nothing but stress and nerves. At first glance it seemed like the Pecha Kucha format would help achieve that perfect balance of drawing some out of their shells while assisting others to retreat a little bit back into theirs.

So did it work?

I dont know yet.

My religion class had been focussed on Islam for a while and so I thought it a good idea to get them to collaborate as a class, in Pecha Kucha style, to produce a ppt that provided an overview of the Muslim faith. I decided to record their efforts using a voice recorder and then insert the audio into the ppt afterwards a la Stale. The presentations went reasonably well although some had prepared more than others as you would expect.

The next lesson I got the students to watch (and listen) to the whole thing and they hated it. They hated hearing themselves and they were mortified when I told them that I planned to upload the file to slideshare to see how it would be recieved by the outside world. They were even more concerned when I informed them that I planned to collaborate with a Middle Eastern school so as to allow Muslim students to evaluate whether or not their presentation was a fair reflection of the Islamic faith.

The students had many concerns and after some discussion we came to a compromise where they would be given some more time and freedom to redraft and perfect their presentation. Now they have until next Friday to perfect their performance. The class have elected an overall leader to oversee the production and 3 group leaders to take care of distinct sections of the whole. I have created 3 rubrics, 1 for the leader another for the group leaders and another for the individuals in each group. I will assess the leader, the leader will assess the group leaders and so on.

I am intrigued to see how it will all work out but for the next 4 lessons my job is simple and with any luck we will all be eagerly anticipating the reviews of the outside world come next Friday.

The joy have having a non externally assessed class with whom I can experiment!!!

Are you listening at the back?

In geography we have fieldwork as a means of creating the ‘classroom without walls’, ‘demonstrating relevance’, ‘bringing the subject to life’ and getting students ‘actively engaged’. Or do we?

I would suggest that, at it’s best, fieldwork can do all of the above, however, at it’s worst it can actually be damaging (at least to student perception of geography).

Clay Burell has refered to ’schooliness’ in his articles concerning the inhibiting effects of applying traditional teaching strategies to new teaching technologies and in many ways I feel that ill conceived fieldwork trips can have similarly counter productive effects.

Fieldwork is a fundamental component of geography and is embedded in every meaningful geography course, but, how can we ensure that it lives up to the lofty objectives mentioned above?

I am not sure of the answer to that question but I would argue that ensuring students are actively involved in (but not totally in control of) designing the hypothesese, selecting the research questions, deciding upon the data collection methods, analysing and evaluating the data is of fundamental importance. And herein lies the difficulty at my current school……

We are constrained by the teacher/student ratio (3 or 4 teachers attempting to ‘teach’ 90 students on trips), security concerns (many of the students are from high profile families and so any venue requires us to investigate the security implications-walking around on the streets unsupervised is out of the question) and lack of focussed geographical study in the middle school years. Consequently, it seems that we have opted for a safety first, heavily controlled, didactic form of trip that is at odds with contemporary pedagogy.  I am left thinking ‘if this were a classroom lesson what would people say?’

Observing the battleground that is social studies IB course option selection I wonder whether the experience of our grade 9 and 10 field trips is a trump card or a joker?

My problem is that I fear the latter and don’t know what to do. 

If there is anyone out there with some creative ideas about how to drag geography field trips into the 21st century then I am all ears.

The link below is to a podcast chat between Mike Kopp and I about the use of technology in education. The core question being ‘is it more important, than ever before, for students to be able to interpret information as opposed to remember it?’

The Point

After reading Clay Burrel’s post concerning ’schooliness’, speaking to numerous respected colleagues of mine and having listened to Clay’s response to my question during our skype conversation today I am still left with an unanswered question. Namely, can the use of web technology such as blogs, wikis, podcasts etc actually save time, as opposed to cost time, in terms of curriculum delivery?

I am very much a believer in the use of such technology as an aid to student understanding but at what cost?

It strikes me that there is often a failure to consider the time constraints placed on IB teachers (and students) to cover the curiculum in the (less than recommended) time when discussing the use of such technologies. Teachers often feel a huge pressure to ‘deliver the syllabus’ so as to avoid the dreaded scenario that their students will be forced to tackle an exam question that they did not adequately cover in class. It is all very well to talk about the benefits of student directed learning, collaboration etc as a means of developing real understanding but shouldn’t we also consider how such technologies might aid in the process of curriculum coverage. After all, teachers subject to the demands of external exams all feel this pressure. I would be most interested in anyone who can provide me with examples of situations in which web 2.0 tech enabled teachers to enhance student understanding and engagement whilst at the same time covering the required chunks of syllabus content.

For links to similar posts on this topic see…..

Mike’s post concerning the relevance of ‘throwing down words like it ain’t no thing’

Mike’s Post

A Nadine inspired comment thread that dicusses the demands of exams

Comment Thread

 

and of course Clay’s posts on ‘Schooliness’ and many more

Clay’s Posts

Mike’s post on the techniques he is using in his film class motivated me to share something i have been trying in my social studies classes in the HS. A link to Mike’s post can be found below.

 Mike’s Post

 Steve’s post about the (anti)social (costs) benefits of web tech for early years students is also worth reading.

Steve’s Post

 

Well, after making token gesture posts i have decided to attempt to include something constructive so here goes…..

I have to admit to being inspired by the words of Mr November in our recent in-service session. I am keen to embrace new ideas and especially keen to include techniques that shift the power from teacher to student. Being a learner who learns best when given power to involve myself actively, i am perhaps biased in my belief that students need to be far more  involved in determining what is relevant. In this case i am not talking about what is relevant to them, as i am still constrained by the bounds of the IB curriculum, but rather what is relevant information within the context of the syllabus topics we cover in IB Geo.

So what have i been doing.

I decided to implement google (collaborative) documents as a means of achieving the following

1. Ensure that each students has quality notes

2. Encourage collaboration amongst students in the hope of generating richer notes

3. Incorporating evaluation (the skill that seperates good from excellent in IB geo) into the students work regularly and explicitly

 

I started somewhat clumsily having no clear idea of how this might work best. Alan November had referred to an example of a teacher who appointed a scribe for the lesson on a rotational basis. The scribe’s job was to note down the key points discussed in the lesson in a google doc and then share the doc with the whole class. The idea being, as i understood it, to free up the rest of the class from focussing on noting down every last thing the teacher said. In theory this would allow the students to concentrate more on what the lesson was actually about, engage more in discussion, contribute more and think in a more critical way about the lesson content.

My first attempts at this method were not particularly successful. I found that the role of scribe was far too demanding as the students scribe could not keep pace with the discussion, nor could the class decide on what was most important and necessary to include. Perhaps the lesson style did not easily allow the scribe to achieve the task but fundamentally it didn’t work.

I was really keen to find a way of making this work and so i changed strategy a little bit and attempted to have all the students working on the document at once in one of the pc labs. What happened in this case was that the document didnt work very well with 18 people attempting to contribute at once (7 is the max i believe). The students found it frustrating and this frustration distracted them from the lesson itself.

The next idea, one that i am still using, was for me to allow all of the students to take their own individual notes during class time and then get them to contribute to a google doc that was preformatted with essential questions for homework. I set up the document with a colour coded legend at the top of the page which instructed students not to use colour at all (only me) and that each colour referred to a request of some kind from me e.g. red was a comment, text selected orange needed to be editted etc I also made this task graded (always sure to grab HS students attention).

The grading system (i felt necessary to emphasise the importance and instigate a culture change) was split in two. Half of the class were given the task of creating the document by a specific date and i graded them based on the revision history of the document. The second task, completed by the other half of the class, was to evaluate the document. I graded this on the basis of an email that each ‘evaluator’ student sent to me justifying their contribution to the document, or lack of it. The evaluators task is particularly useful, i feel, as they really have to reflect on both the content of the document and on their understanding of it.

 

What i have found is that i have, at least partially, achieved my objectives of..

1. Ensuring high quality notes

2. Encouraging collaboration

3. Developing the students understanding of what evaluation is and improving their ability to do it

 

It is not perfect and some of the students are still reluctant but i think most of them like it. Many of the less organised and poorer note takers have said that it provides them far superior notes to what they would have taken independently. Furthermore, many of the really excellent students have found that they can take the work to a higher level by including their own independently researched info. 

I am sure that i have not perfected this yet and anticipate adapting my ideas as i become more technologically savvy. Hopefully this blog will help speed up the process of improvement….

Inshala

If you are interested in having a look at one of the ongoing documents select the link below. I would be very happy to get suggestions on how to improve it.

Example Google Doc