Monday, January 19, 2009

Reflection on our October meeting.

E2T2 notes re monthly meetings/classes.
2. October 24 & 25 2008.
Various reflections on progress with students & colleagues since we last met. Also, some sharing of things we had discovered while exploring technology for education.
I reported about my classes’ history with blogs & wikis & then how as students in groups they had used wikis as a collaborative tool to research provinces & territories of Canada. There is a report in detail on my blog site.
Much more discussion in groups about getting students motivated, organized & let them know what is available. We focused on students being in control & achieving something meaningful.
Ø Self-directed & motivated – they need to have a sense of it being their product.
Ø Their evaluating information – different types of sources
- different origins of sources
- how to evaluate sources
- get an idea of how search engines operate
Then the session moved to discussing a variety of technological tools such as Screencasting, Voicethread, Camstudio, Thread & Flowgram. We have been given, along the way, a variety of links on the E2T2 web site to find many different web tools for constructing products, allowing collaboration & rich mediums for doing presentations.
The afternoon was valuable for workshops to explore what is available, to see what they can produce & to be given time to explore.
The next session moved on to looking at various ways to construct student learning. A focus was understanding by design & “backward design”.
There was some exploration of ‘assessment’ being the primary role in learning. Also, the primacy of ‘essential questions’.
We need to understand
How do students demonstrate learning
What sort of evidence should be used to demonstrate that learning
Discussion moved to the place of clickers in the classroom. Such as assessment tools, monitoring student learning & their value for immediate feedback.
Surveymonkey.com – discussion about its usefulness with students & colleagues in a various ways. We were given time to explore the site & demonstrate a possible application.
Other items that cropped up were creativecommons.org, del-icio-us (now delicious) & deego (?).
More workshops were offered such as Digitales & opportunities to explore SMART boards.
These sessions continue to be informative, flexible & facilitators/participants responsive.

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