A learning journey with no fixed abode
How much more motivating for students to be enabled through the use of the IWB to take a lead role in directing class discussion on a text. Not only does the use of technology motivate the student body as a whole but the fact that a student is leading the discussion, asking the questions, noting the comments- not crusty old me! That’s equally motivating. Students sharing their learning and opinions openly and freely. YES!
By way of a literacy warm up the other day we all sat around in a circle and told a story.
There were not many rules to this game:
1. No names of people in the room are allowed
2. No more than 3 sentences spoken
3. The final sentence should be left half finished.
It was a step of faith on my part, I have not tried this with any group or class before. I was pleasently surprised. First with the ideas flowing and also the sense that the story made in the end. I found it a great warm up activity, particularly if you disperse the ‘not so imaginative’ students around the circle.
I would love it if you could play….
"Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, there lived a wollot, whose name was Fringle. Now Fringle lived in a small cave on the edge of a vast forest. There was nothing Fringle enjoyed more than…."
In my presentation on SkypeTalkandWrite I spent very little time talking about the background to its use in the classroom.
Skypetalkandwrite is a synchronous conferencing tool. In this book David Jonassen talks about ‘How..synchronous conferencing can be used as a mindtool.’
These tools are not new, back in the day there were MOOs, MUSEs, MUSHs, MUDs some or all of these are still in use in various forms.
Neither is skypetalkandwrite unique Microsoft Netmeeting, CUseeME are two other examples on synchronous conferencing being used today and I’m sure there are others.
What I’d like to focus on here is the value of the real-time communication which enables learners to become discursive members of a wider community. As with any level of real time conversation it is important to ensure it stays on track. There is a fine line here to consider, with synchronous conferences being in nature social it is important to establish, and maintain, the purpose of the discourse to avoid the quality of conversation spiralling downwards.One of the key ways to do this is offer purposeful conversation, students require a project to engage with, an issue to debate or a problem to resolve. It is often helpful for students to share a workspace on line, it is good for then to see a product of their labours. This is where the ‘object’- the shared whiteboard provided by the TalkandWrite software comes in, it focuses the students attention on the project at had. Without a shared ‘object’ conversation can deteriorate very quickly (just like a real classroom)
The single most powerful aspect of a synchronous conference is the immediacy. ‘Live interactions produce more motivation to contribute’
There are other applications out there, Web 2.0 is full of synchronous and asynchronous tools. I guess it’s what drives the social networking, the picking and choosing of applications to meet your communication needs. As I type this I was engaged in a conversation with Amanda about this very subject and I started out hoping to support my presentation with some theory but never mind. This is how I conversation went:
Dragon09 says: Am writing a post about synchronous conferences…. any thoughts?
Amanda says: i.e. k12 online chats?
Dragon09 says: yeah true…Skype too
Amanda says: or what Ewan talks about in his blog about being able to respond while he gives his keynote?
Dragon09 says: Sort of, but I think that is technically asynchronous cos you don’t need to be on at the same time like we are now
Amanda says: ah yes you would be right in that
Dragon09 says: Twitters an interesting one, its kinda both.. if you think about our ERO twitters yesterday, hours apart, but if you catch people on at the same time it can be…synchronous
Amanda says: definitely
Amanda says: I think that they synchronous element is important in a conference I went to Ulearn last year but didn’t have the contact other than the people i went to school with and some people i met. But after I met you and begun to have more contact with people within the conference via twitters it changed the dimension of the conference. It changed from being me thoughts between the speaker and myself to the possibility of having other peoples opinions i.e. the Helen Baxter presentation and the twitters and examples that were given in rebuttal or agreement with her presentation It meant that I was questioning and thinking during the keynote to a higher dimension than if I was just sitting there listening to HER. Make sense?
AtoL Expo 07, arranged by Massey University was packed out today with teachers from around the country. It was hosted at Havelock North Intermediate School with two excellent keynote addresses, the first from John Hattie from Auckland University and the second Erika Ross, Manager of the Literacy, Numeracy and Assessment team in the Ministry of Education in
Wellington. More about them in another post or two.
What I would like to talk about now is Regan Orr, from Russell St. He talked about students creating their own criteria/ matrix. When I read it I thought ‘oh, he means success criteria from the Learning Objectives’, but it blew me away when he actually meant what he had written. He talked us through how his Y5/6 class spent the whole term on ‘Procedural writing’ but for the first two weeks they did no writing at all. But talked and discussed what a procedure was, what were features of a good procedure? He pulled out of School Journals a variety of examples and the students highlighted different parts of them a discussed what each feature was. From there they looked at what an ‘expert’ would create as a procedure, then what a ‘novice would be doing than then the ‘practitioner’ in the middle. The students, over the first three weeks had created (with some scaffolding and support) their own matrix for procedure writing. From there they each got a copy and for each of their own procedures highlighted on their copy of the matrix where they thought that piece of writing fitted. Genius.
My class are doing Explanation writing this term. Hope he stay in touch, I want to do this thing the best that I can.
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