ePortfolio "freebie"

“Knowledge may maintain consistency in the explicit, while undergoing radical changes in the tacit and we believe that understanding how knowledge is both created and how it flows in the tacit is the key to understanding and transforming learning in the 21st century.” Quote from an interview with John Seely Brown, “A New Culture of Learning.”

At the beginning of this course, one of the more profound moments for me resulted from viewing a videotaped interview with advanced thinker and scholar, John Seely Brown. He so eloquently addressed the challenges we face with the rapidly changing role for educators from instructor to facilitator -“being expert in a particular area of knowledge, to becoming expert in the ability to create and shape new learning environments.”

For fellow educators seeking new technology skills for "shaping a new learning environment," may I share a wonderful example done with the tech application  and media aggregate,VOICETHREAD. Click on the link BELOW and see what the application,Voicethread, can do for a teacher who seeks to expand opportunites for students to think and create in multiple dimensional ways. I love this project because each group of students created a new layer of interpretation, applying different modalities (poetry, music and visual art) to represent their thoughts about a simple theme of “places I like to visit or imagine visiting.”

http://ed.voicethread.com/community/library/K12_art_poetry_and_music_from_Erin_Berg/

The project: Second graders first completed a piece of artwork, depicting a place they love to visit or imagine visiting. Then, 9th graders used a Wiki to few and then select various pieces of artwork. They created poetry and recited their work on the VT. Then, the link was sent to a classroom in Texas, where students worked to compose an original piece of music for each picture using GarageBand. Overall, it took about 2 1/2 months to put together.  Don’t forget to click on the “St. Marks” thumbnail to hear wonderful, original digital music by 5th & 6th grade student in Texas.  I love this project!!

Module 4.4 Key Ideas

Course: Integrated Teaching and Learning with Technology Applications


The assignment this week in my "Essentials of eLearning" course is to begin thinking about a framework for an online course we might develop and teach. By framework, I mean - the essential understandings students will “come away with” after participating in my course. Antioch’s School of Education recently streamlined some of the course offerings for the GATP program. Because they currently are not offering a technology course for pre-service teachers, I thought certain technology applications (as a required competency) could be taught in a workshop format, integrating these applications into several methods courses. Example, teaching students about the “VoiceThread” application by collaborating with the social studies methods instructor. Because integrated instruction is one of my areas of expertise, I am excited about the unlimited potential I see for how technology can enhance learning in the classroom as an integrated component. Here are some essential understandings my students (pre-service teachers) would acquire from this course:

• Multi-disciplinary instruction must make meaningful connections among all subject areas. One subject area should not be compromised and become the “hand-maiden” to the other.

• When teaching from a multi-disciplinary perspective, each discipline needs to maintain its own integrity. Your students will uncover the relationships among each discipline with well developed “guiding questions.”

• Arts concepts and technology applications should be taught and appreciated for their unique modes of thinking and expression.

• Organizing teaching around “essential understandings” provides the learner an opportunity to see patterns and connections to ideas that are often universally applicable. This process promotes critical thinking and creativity (important 21st century skills.)

Summarizing some of my learning, thus far, from Teaching Online

TEACHING ONLINE. Education 251 course: Bellevue College winter 2011
Instructor: Jennifer Dalby

Textbooks:  The Online Teaching Survival Guide, J. Boettcher & R. Conrad
                                                                    2010
                  Understanding by Design, G. Wiggins & J. McTighe 1998
 
Having taken only two courses online, each being very different in style and content, I've decided to sart outlining some of the most important considerations we have addressed so far in, Teaching Online with Jennifer Dalby.  This is also a good way for me to start using my blog for reflections and growth.  Below are examples:

• The most salient fact I've realized thus far - the importance of establishing a consistent presence online when teaching a course so that students know you’re around, available, and engaged. Our instructor is doing a great of job modeling this practice, by actively posting course related links, and stimulating conversations through the use of the useful social networking tool, Diigo.
  
• Student-centered learning where faculty shifts time from large group teaching presence to more personalized and small group teaching presence; supporting more learners-as-leaders experiences; reviewing, mentoring projects, and providing feedback on assignments.

From the Boettcher and Conrad book, the following list summarizes some of their essential features for online course design:
o Be present at the course site

o Create a supportive online course community

o Use a variety of large group, small group, and individual work experiences

o Prepare Discussion posts that invite responses, questions, discussions, and reflections

o Search out and use content resources that are available in digital format if possible

o The value of soliciting feedback, ideas, and favored online resources drawing on the wisdom of the crowd: ie, the collective experience of students. This shifts the classroom structure from you as the knowledge sources to a social network / learning community.

Here are a few social media applications (and the list will grow!)
YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr,  Blogger, and WordPress

An educational experience and how it helped me learn and develop

During our first course in this certification program, eLearning for Educators, we were introduced to a technology tool, “VoiceThread” – a media aggregate which allows for a collaborative, multimedia slide show displaying images, documents and videos accompanied with people's comments using their voice, text, or audio file. Instructors can record students’ thoughts and opinions about historical images, artwork, etc. and create presentations that become collaborative endeavors. As an educator who teaches pre-service teachers how to integrate arts learning into core curriculum, this technology tool really resonated with me.


Exploring the VT website, I found an excellent VoiceThread  project created by 3 different classrooms of students from different regions of the country. 2nd graders from Utah created artwork depicting a place they love to visit or imagine visiting. 9th graders from Colorado composed poetry addressing their perceptions of the artwork. Then, as a link, it was sent to a classroom in Texas, where students worked to compose an original piece of music for each image using GarageBand. The results was truly inspiring. This VT project was very creative, original and provided multiple learning opportunities in both technology applications and multi-arts (visual, music & poetry) for the participants.

Even though I was not experienced in this new technology application, I showed my summer cohort of students several examples of VoiceThread projects and presented them with an idea. We could create a VT project of them  learning different art forms during the artists’ workshops in my course. I would edit and put these video recordings into a VoiceThread medium and ask each student to contribute a recording of their reflections addressing how they might integrate, say movement and dance, into core subject areas for teaching.

My students fully embraced this project even though it was not included in my original course syllabus. What I learned from this experience reminded me of a discussion we read by visionary scholar, John Seely Brown, where he discusses how technology is fostering a new culture for learning. Brown states, " Our argument brings to the fore the old aphorism "imagination is more important than knowledge." In a networked world, information is always available and getting easier and easier to access. Imagination, what you actually do with that information, is the new challenge."  Educators need to become more fluid with conveying knowledge and focus also upon the context for how new knowledge can be applied and appreciated.  I will keep this thought in mind as I begin thinking about my on-line course.