Reflections & Learning in ETEC565A

Ok, I have to admit, I am getting comfortable in Moodle (to some extent) and I am now at the stage where I keep tweaking it.  It is time soon for me to say, “enough” and put it to rest – just like with any assignment, you have to say ‘done’!   Not sure if this is the LMS I will ever use again – as long as D2L is provided free for us to use, I don’t see the need – but I would revisit it once the funding ends, and we all know that it will some day.   We are just one election away from the possibility of big changes to the funding for education in Ontario.  I will not want to lose the opportunity to keep blended learning alive in our schools and after its major expansion coming up in September, the teachers and students will become familiar with it and I hope they will find it to be invaluable for learning.  So I am keeping all my notes and tutorial links just in case!

I have chosen to create a digital story that relates directly to my Assessment & Evaluation Course in my Moodle – that is, the need for change.  I have used a bit of hyperbole in that I am making a connection to VERY old teaching environments.  I wanted to make a point that a change in assessment and evaluation practices is needed now – and going back in time more than necessary is how I chose to move us forward.  I find that using videos (with music) is more engaging than a slideshow but there is the risk of missing key ideas since the use of text is very limited especially in Animoto (my choice of tool).  This application is very easy to use, very intuitive and students would have no problem creating videos within this site.  However, the challenge is in ensuring that the activity uses higher order thinking – just like the posters and title pages of old, it can be quite easy to just download a large number of photos, add a song and call it an assignment.  Our challenge is to ensure that students use critical and creative thinking when presenting their stories in this fashion. 

Here is my story:

Spent two days listening to how various school districts across Canada focus on change in their schools – Change that means improved student learning and acknowledgement that technology can be a powerful tool to enhance this learning. In every case, leaders made sure that the emphasis was on student learning first, not technology – to make sure that no one makes the mistake of jumping on the technology bandwagon just for the sake of new toys.
In each case, visions were created, new committees and teams were established and the focus for PD moved away from teaching to student learning. Interesting ways that boards handled the PD and how they found the money to pay for new technology that was needed. Common trends were:

• no new money was coming, just re-allocating what they already had
• libraries converted to learning commons, with a greater presence of collaboration through technology
• online PD for teachers (one board started an Earn A Laptop program – teachers finish 8 out of 14 online PD courses and they get a laptop for free for as long as they work for the board.  4 of the courses are mandatory, the others based on interest)
• schools fully wireless
• students bringing in their own devices (BYOD)
• full support of stakeholders by including them in focus groups (parents, teachers, students, trustees, vendors)
• a focus on 21st century skills – and student-centred environments
• innovation initiatives – teachers applying for funding for innovation projects for their classrooms
• better cooperation between academic and ICT departments at central offices

The experience of so many dedicated leaders was very valuable to those of us who attended from our district.  Now to take our learning back home and making our own plan work.  The one sure thing we know is that we have no funds for this so creativity is key!

Using the wiki in this course felt quite different than in any previous wiki activity I have encountered. But when I really think about it, any other wiki I have been involved with (usually wikispaces), there was limited collaboration, so in reality it was really just a blog. Here in 565, I felt that we were all involved, but more as parallel contributors, not so much in true collaboration. At first, we just posted our sightings as individuals albeit in many different locations! So it became interesting to see how the content seemed to move around, become more organized, all mysteriously!

I’m really not used to this anonymous tinkering with the content – Using Google docs all this time means I am used to knowing who added what by the use of comments, coloured fonts, headings with our names etc. So the mysterious revisions to our wiki was a bit spooky! How’s that for graduate-level vocabulary!

Yesterday was an information-filled day giving me many ideas to take back to my board. My first session was presented by Ian Jukes – I’ve heard him before, in fact, the same presentation quite a few years ago, but just like reading the same article in 565 as I did in a previous MET course, the context is different and so the message landed in a very different way.
 

Ian spoke about the Digital Generation and compared how they learn compared to how teachers teach – they are divergent thinkers, we are linear, they process information quickly, we dish it out slowly and sequentially. He offers the challenge that since research shows that multi-tasking does not result in sustained learning, how do we as educators straddle the need for focused attention for learning with their preference for partial attention?
Lots of great quotes – “Knowing what we know about research and about how digital learners learn, and we don’t change how we teach, who has the learning problem – the kids, or us?”

Ian also presented his 21 Century Fluency project.  What I like about his skill framework is that he provides detailed practices to teach the skills – so many others simply list the skills we need to teach, but leave teachers to try to figure out just how to make them happen their classroom.

I also had to share Gary Hayes’ Social Media Count site – very appropriate in light of Module 4 in 565!

The rest of the day was spent with an Ottawa superintendent who laid out his board’s strategic plan in their Blueprint for the future – how they are changing the pedagogy and technology use in their schools – something I need to mull over and perhaps visit a few of his schools this fall to see it in action.  Key to his success was in setting up focus groups of all stakeholders to get buy-in for the changes that had to be made such as changing school libraries, cancelling some popular programs to fund technology purchases etc.  Getting support of these groups made for a much smoother transition.

 Today, I hear about another board’s plan to do the same.   So much to learn!

Here I am at the Canadian Association of School Administrators annual conference in Niagara Falls for the sole reason that this year’s topic is 21st Century Learning. Otherwise, I would be sitting on a lounge chair in my back yard enjoying the birds chirping and the sun shining. Instead, my view out my hotel room is a huge Hershey’s Kiss ( so much for the Falls view room I booked!)
Topics today include:
Understanding the Digital Generation
Literacy is not an Option
Cultivating Creativity and Teamwork in your classrooms
Bringing 21st Century Learning from Board Vision to Classroom Practice ( I won’t miss this one!)
It’s More than Equipment that Needs to Change
Visual Learning: The Next Paradigm Shift

And that is just one day! I am here for 2 additional days filled with great topics – I don’t know how I will choose! I’ll be posting my learning here each day!

I am doing a happy dance thanks to the memo we received on the last day of school – yesterday, that is. The Ministry of Ed is providing access to D2L, our e-learning LMS, to ALL students in Ontario so that blended learning can take place in ALL classrooms! We have been a pilot board for the last 3 years and it has been so exciting to see 350 of our Grade 7-11 students and teachers enjoy the use of online learning as a complement to their face-to-face instruction. Teachers who could not participate due to the limitation of 350 students, begged to be considered for this project next year. So this announcement is making waves in Ontario!

To add to my joy, they are including funding for a full-time e-learning support teacher who will provide assistance to us in this initiative AND additional funds to cover expenses such as mileage! The reason I am so happy is – we just eliminated the position of e-learning/software specialist in our board to cut costs and I was in a panic as to how I was going to support the e-learning teachers and the blended learning teachers next year. So I am looking forward to having him return to the fold at central office!! Manna from heaven, I tell you!!

This is the time of year when we are winding down the school year and wrapping up the work that has been ongoing for many months. We packed up the netbooks in our blended e-learning project, picked up the Kindles from our adolescent boys reading project, rounded up the document cameras and flip cameras for our assessment For learning inquiry project – all to be stored safely here at our central office, ready for re-deployment to the classrooms next year. So many reports to complete, so many budgets to wrap up. And yet, my new Superintendent (reassigned just last week to my secondary school department) now needs me to prepare all of the plans for next year. Can I say I am just too darned tired to think that far ahead? I hope he understands…after all, I have a Moodle site to build – One that I am SURE will be the end of me.

When I talk to my IT department about my struggles with html, they look at me in bewilderment – WHY would I ever have to deal with html in a WYSIWYG world? So they are NO help! I keep telling myself, that if you really want to learn how to drive, you need to know how engines work, and how to change a tire – the real basics of the car…so that is how I am trying to justify my frustration with code! I tell myself it will make me a better person right? Please tell me I am right!

I have to admit that this assignment has been one of the more challenging tasks that I have had to complete, yet it was only 1000 words!  I have written much longer pieces for other courses, but it was the content of this one that had me sweating.  I found that I had to put myself in the mindset of actually facing my Learning Services team – my Director, the 2 Superintendents and managers of finance and ICT in order to develop the language we use when we present proposals – and I have done a few in my years as a central office adminstrator for secondary curriculum programming. Each time I have pitched an idea to the group, I faced the toughest scrutiny in the area of financing my ideas. I decided to create this proposal as though it was an authentic task – I told myself that I really am proposing this at our next meeting (maybe I should?) and so I used current practices in our board so that it could be as authentic as possible for me. 

The Learning Services team is not as tech-savvy as I would hope (with the exception of the ICT manager) and so getting into the tech-vocabulary usually results in glossy-eyed boredom on some of their faces.  So I stuck with the pedagogical focus – that’s where I can hold their attention.  I’m not criticizing them for having a different perspective than me – in fact, I am told that it is why I am part of the team – to help move them forward in their thinking about 21st century teaching and learning.  I really hope that I can pitch this for real some day!

The more I ponder what my Moodle production will contain, the more I am determined to see how I can make it applicable to the adult learner – specifically the teachers (and why not administrators too?) in our system.  We need to reformulate how we do PD for our teachers, as well all know that the “sit and git” model doesn’t work with adults any more than it works with our students.  Without a meaningful way of incorporating the learning into an authentic experience, and following up with sharing how it’s all working with others, we are spending a lot of money what I believe is little impact.

I am hoping I can create a structure for teachers to participate in a self-paced, independent learning environment but at the same time incorporate some accountability and requirement for sharing the learning with others…Am I asking too much?

I found an interesting resource, on Google of course, about Adult Learning Theory (who knew it would be different from our students?)  The author of the site proposes that there are 4 stages of Adult Learning:

1. Unconscious Incompetence (you don’t know that you don’t know something), to

2. Conscious Incompetence (you are now aware that you are incompetent at something), to

3. Conscious Competence (you develop a skill in that area but have to think about it),to the finalstage

4.Unconscious Competence (you are good at it and it now comes naturally).

Now I would be the last person to suggest incompetence in our teachers (here comes the union grievance if I did!).  They really are all well-trained, hard working, well-intentioned people that I am proud to work with…but we all have new things to learn and we all need to do some self-reflection as to where we are.  So often I see surveys from teachers who insist they do this or that strategy in their classrooms, but when I visit their rooms I can see that they don’t always grasp the concept – hence, they might not know what they don’t know…I hesitate to call that incompetence, but perhaps I could call it ” learning-in-progress”.

So my Moodle may be something I can use to provide a source of learning – for now, on a single topic for the purpose of this assignment, but then moving forward to a broader framework for adult learning..moving us all to the final stage of ‘unconscious competence” ( another nasty term!)

This rambling is a result of my thoughts on the upcoming proposal that I need to formulate…the ruminations continue.