Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Group Leadership Project
What tool did your group use to deliver the PD tutorial? Why?
We used Prezi as our presentation tool. I have used Prezi Meeting in a group presentation before and it is very easy to segregate the workload easily using it. We could easily add video and audio by either using flv files or uploading our videos to YouTube. So therefore, it worked out great as a standalone presentation tool.
What did you learn during the development process of the final product?
The first time I used Prezi meeting in another group presentation we had one group member who was late finishing his part of the presentation. This time everyone was amazing and had their work done ahead of schedule. This helps immensely as we could continue and finish the path early and see if we needed to change anything.
What would you do differently if you had to develop a similar product again?
Not a lot to be honest! The communication was great, we each knew which area to work on and we did so effectively. What I want to do is do some more research on animation apps on the iPad. I haven't looked further than Doink because I've been working with it for 2 years now on their website with G3-5 students. So it was a natural progression for me to check out their app on the iPad.
PART D - Findings and Implications
Formative: Did the project get implemented as planned?
The project did not go as planned right from the get go! The timing was terrible to put it bluntly. We had portfolio day coming up and we are now on Easter break so mindsets were not switched on to implementing anything new in the classroom.
Summative: Evidence of success in addressing the problem of practice
I still firmly believe that Twitter can be used very effectively as a communications tool in the Elementary classroom. It is immediate and opens up very effective and efficient communications between the students and parents and the outside world.
Even with the mere three Tweets that were sent out http://twitter.com/#!/g5isf I could get a sense of the way Twitter could work as a "as it happens" journal of what students are learning in class.
The initial plan of Tweeting on a school trip is a very sound idea and one that I will implement in the future. School trips (especially overnight ones) are a time of worry and stress for parents wondering what is going on and what their children are doing and I think Twitter is an awesome idea to bridge the gap between school trip and home. It can fulfill both academic and emotional objectives nicely!
How would you approach another project of this type differently given what you’ve learned here?
I will be doing this project again and I will plan it accordingly. But teachers, students and parents need to be given heads up a long time in advance about it. Moving to a new school next year I need to instill an environment that projects like this will happen and are valuable activities to partake in. If the mood is set at the start of the school year that technology will be an increasingly used tool then projects like these will be implemented and used easier.
What are the lessons learned that others might benefit from knowing about?
Don't plan a technology integrated project without substantial thought and planning first. This Twitter activity was and is something that can become a major part of the daily classroom life so preparation, discussion and lessons regarding social media, digital citizenship/safety and teacher meetings are essential. The project will fail if not enough planning is done.
In what ways will you endeavor to do the same project again, and what will you change or not do?
This is my job and this is what I do. I will be doing projects like this very regularly in the course of my work in schools. I will implement a Twitter classroom next school year, that is a goal. I'm thinking I can try it out on an Early Years classroom as parents are a lot more interested in what their children are up to in those Grades! But I also want classrooms to be blogging too so I need to think about it over the Summer, I need to meet with teachers and administration to scope out the atmosphere and thinking about technology at my new school. Then, and only then, will I make final decisions on what best suits the environment of the school.
The project did not go as planned right from the get go! The timing was terrible to put it bluntly. We had portfolio day coming up and we are now on Easter break so mindsets were not switched on to implementing anything new in the classroom.
Summative: Evidence of success in addressing the problem of practice
I still firmly believe that Twitter can be used very effectively as a communications tool in the Elementary classroom. It is immediate and opens up very effective and efficient communications between the students and parents and the outside world.
Even with the mere three Tweets that were sent out http://twitter.com/#!/g5isf I could get a sense of the way Twitter could work as a "as it happens" journal of what students are learning in class.
The initial plan of Tweeting on a school trip is a very sound idea and one that I will implement in the future. School trips (especially overnight ones) are a time of worry and stress for parents wondering what is going on and what their children are doing and I think Twitter is an awesome idea to bridge the gap between school trip and home. It can fulfill both academic and emotional objectives nicely!
How would you approach another project of this type differently given what you’ve learned here?
I will be doing this project again and I will plan it accordingly. But teachers, students and parents need to be given heads up a long time in advance about it. Moving to a new school next year I need to instill an environment that projects like this will happen and are valuable activities to partake in. If the mood is set at the start of the school year that technology will be an increasingly used tool then projects like these will be implemented and used easier.
What are the lessons learned that others might benefit from knowing about?
Don't plan a technology integrated project without substantial thought and planning first. This Twitter activity was and is something that can become a major part of the daily classroom life so preparation, discussion and lessons regarding social media, digital citizenship/safety and teacher meetings are essential. The project will fail if not enough planning is done.
In what ways will you endeavor to do the same project again, and what will you change or not do?
This is my job and this is what I do. I will be doing projects like this very regularly in the course of my work in schools. I will implement a Twitter classroom next school year, that is a goal. I'm thinking I can try it out on an Early Years classroom as parents are a lot more interested in what their children are up to in those Grades! But I also want classrooms to be blogging too so I need to think about it over the Summer, I need to meet with teachers and administration to scope out the atmosphere and thinking about technology at my new school. Then, and only then, will I make final decisions on what best suits the environment of the school.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Mobile Learning
Make a live audience poll at Poll Everywhere
I used PollEverywhere to produce a quick poll on website usage for our Grade 5s. Because I work with K-5 the introduction of cell phones into our classrooms is not going to happen so we could not avail of cell phone voting.
Polleverywhere is an interesting website and although it pushes it's utility towards cell phone voting it doesn't make it too hard to vote using a widget.
I asked the question "What website do you use most at home?" For two sets of classes I used the "option poll" so the students didn't have free choice. Good to see that they visit their class blogs more than Facebook!
With the other two classes I used the "free text" based answers, because although I think I'm pretty hip to what websites Grade 5 students go to I wanted to see what the current trend is! With the text based answers poll I could not embed an input area into our Grade 5 blog so I had to link to the input box on the polleverywhere website.
Unfortunately on the final day of term before Easter break my G5 teacher forgot to give the poll to the kids so I tweeted it out to populate the poll. Unfortunately, again, some neanderthal decided to put a porn site down as their most favorite website to visit at home. So I had to take down the poll...
Mobile learning is certainly a technology that suits the age we live in. I have introduced 40 iPod Touches to our Kindergarten year which gives each classroom a set of 4 to use. We are also seeing how iPads can be utilized in the upper elementary school. So far it's harder to choose iPads over laptops. In my opinion, at the moment, iPads and Ipod Touches are at their most beneficial in the early years due to the vast amount of educational apps geared towards that age group.
We are living in transitional times regarding what technologies to use in our classroom. There are are debates and some quite heated ones going on in the comments section of blog posts and online newspaper articles. Again we are at a moment in technology evolution where some people are just plain scared of change and introducing any sort of "technological" item into the classroom to assist learning will set alarm bells ringing.
Educational technology is ever changing, ever innovating and the critics will always be evolving their counter-claims to any sort of change. The future is blurry but mobile technology is going to become a big part of education.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
PART C - Implementation
Podcast Here!
Surprises
As the planning for this was altered drastically from my initial plan to Tweet our field trip to Taiwan I've had to rush out an email to the parents of one class last week (it didn't help I was away at a conference for five days!). The plan is to trial run with it in one class to see what the experience is for students. I sent out the following email to the parents:
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Dear 5Z Parents,
In an effort to integrate more 21st Century aspects into our classrooms we are going to trial using Twitter to allow students to share and reflect more effectively with family, classmates and the world beyond.
What is Twitter? Well, take a look at the following Common-Craft video (as you may know our students have been making these recently, but this is from the official site!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o
Ok, so now you know what Twitter is, how can you start following our class Twitter account. Follow this simple video to create your own account: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO2o7pCaw4o
When you have created your Twitter account go to this address http://twitter.com/#!/g5isf and then click the Green Follow button, then you will be able to follow all of our Tweets from G5Z.
Any questions, please drop me a line at cgallagher@isf.edu.hk.
Best Regards,
Colin Gallagher
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The surprises are and were that the number of replies have been sparse to say the least which leads me to.....
Unexpected bumps in the road (What you would revise)
Parents were not very responsive, only two responded to me. One to ask a question about the sign-up and one that was concerned about safety. I was actually expecting more queries about safety but as we had guidelines about safety in respect to our Grade 5 student blogs and would follow the same guidelines I guess it wasn't too much of an issue. At the minute we only have two parents following us so far. As the parents of our Grade 5 students have not been the most active responding to our students' blogs I guess this shouldn't be too much of a shock With moving to a new school next year I think any initiatives like this should be laid out at the start of the year, if a school's environment is not conducive or responsive to these types of initiatives (or not prepared) then the uptake will be poor.
Delights (What went well)
The students were enthusiastic at first. Initial impressions from the classroom teacher were that the students were thinking more on things they can reflect on and Tweet about. They could tell the difference between the more planned blogging to the more immediate and spur-of-the-moment Tweeting.
However, after a couple of days there hasn't been much tweeting. I will be looking into this and the reasons why in my final presentation.
However, after a couple of days there hasn't been much tweeting. I will be looking into this and the reasons why in my final presentation.
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