Today I had a meeting with stakeholders in the DHP (administration from 2 schools, education liaison from DCMA, another DCMA representative and Asher). We talked about moving forward. There will be a few changes next year in addition to Neil's retirement. The museum will be going through a renovation during second semester, which is the time when the program spends 1/2 the time there and the other 1/2 the time at ODSS. Because of the renovation we will have to change that up.
One of the things we talked about was getting together with the museum staff through video chat. Currently UGDSB does not allow students to access google hangouts. We can get around this by having a teacher log in and allowing the students access to the museum through the teacher's login, but that doesn't really give ownership to the students if they want to connect independently.
We also talked about a possible shift from D2L to Google Classroom. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I really like Google Classroom, but I don't think it is as robust as D2L. But if we aren't using all the features in D2L anyway then maybe that doesn't matter. It would get rid of a pretty huge learning curve for the students in a semester where their learning is already pretty huge. One of the stumbling blocks will be trying to get the museum educator a ugcloud login so she can continue to be active in their learning. In fact, she thinks she will be able to be even more connected to the students as it will be easier for her to see their process.
The other concern that was brought up by one of the administrators was students' concerns about being disconnected from their home school. Students miss out on spirit days, or grad photos and the like. We are now considering having a day a week where the students all work in the library/learning commons in their home school. We could somehow connect with them during the day - google hangout if we can get them access, or I suggested Blackboard Collaborate if the board has that, or Adobe Connect. We also thought that we (teachers) could travel to the various schools - either all three at different points during the day, or one school each week - maybe do the live chats from a different school each time. In addition to helping the students keep connected with their home school community, it will also cut back on busing costs - one of the biggest costs of the program.
These shifts will also help enforce the digital learning aspect of the Digital Historian Project.
After I got home and was reflecting on how to make sure the students were engaging with the course when they were on their own, I thought about some of the ways we, as students in IICTI, were encouraged to engage with the material and each other when we weren't face to face. I started thinking maybe each week (or homeschool day) there was an activity where students posted a piece of their own learning in the morning, then in the afternoon spent some time commenting on each others. This could be done via VoiceThread as in module 6/7/8 or the slideshow from module 10.
Hi Lisa,
ReplyDeleteI think you could easily take some of the tools we've used and think about the ability to build community with them to stay connected. You mention 2 awesome ones - it might be a good idea to buy your own Voicethread account, because you could actually set up groups for feedback and discussion, and remember they could actually do this with video or audio...very engaging. Kids could pose questions of the museum staff and they could come on and discuss as well. Your other suggestion, google slides, I find nice to use because you could embed youtube videos and images as well as text, and then the discussions could continue as comments or even with notes in the slides - another good one.
Have you considered a blog? If you were to start a class blog and then invite students as co-writers then you'd have collaboration space that is more like discussion/reflection, with your google classroom for storage and sharing of files and resources. If you ended up with hangouts on air for your hangouts, they could get posted to the blog or added as files. The old google site could work the same way...it allowed for more of a wiki-like space...I remember teaching a whole IICTI course using that and Google Classroom. You might check out wikispaces too, they've made some updates that allow a teacher to have a classroom and assign project spaces for groups of students as well as have some pages for collaboration, some pages as static website pages. Wikispaces is supposed to be one of the 'whitelisted' sites for use at UGDSB, along with Voicethread.