professional learning – Julia Falzon

Today in EDCI336 we had the pleasure of video-conferencing Verena Roberts. Verena is a teacher and an expert in open pedagogy. In her own teaching, she values inquiry, active participation, and community engagement. I have included some notes that I took during her presentation below:

Open Education Practice: intentional design to expand and share learning opportunities for all learners across classroom walls encourage network participation from different cultural groups

Designing for sharing
Multiple perspectives (everyone has a voice)
Participatory learning
Develop and encourage personal learning networks (PLN)
Design and value safe learning spaces
Expanded learning environments do not just have to be online
Creating resources with the intention to share them openly (Google Classroom makes it hard to share resources–use Trello instead!)

RELATIONSHIPS: intentional interactions, collaborations, connections that facilitate digital literacy

Verena used an innovative polling tool (polleverywhere) in order to interact with both of the groups and get to know us all before she started her presentation.

Verena’s research questions:

How do I search & communicate online? Finding credible content, communicating online
Who is my online audience? Data, security, digital mapping, data analysis
How do I solve a community problem? à Authentic resources, using social media, connecting outside the classroom, using open content
What is my story & how does my story inform my identity? Critical thinking, storytelling/perspectives (Indigenous lens)

Find Verena on twitter: @verenaz

Today the class had the pleasure of video-conferencing Ian Landy (whose blog I have linked at the bottom of this post), an educator who is an expert on using technology to document and make assessments based on student work. The video conference itself was a unique experience. To be completely honest, I was thoroughly distracted for the first 15 minutes of the class because I could see the mirror image of our class on one of the screens. When Ian changed the screen that was showing the image of the class to his slides, I was finally able to concentrate. The quality of the video conference was quite high, much higher than I am used to when I have used tools such as Skype and FaceTime in the past. The audio cut out a couple of times, but it did not detract from the overall experience.

In terms of content, Ian went above and beyond. I wish we had more time to talk to him because he clearly has a wealth of knowledge to share. I was fascinated by his approach to formative and summative assessment. I was shocked when he said that he hadn’t used letter grades in thirteen years. Are letter grades necessary? I pondered this question throughout his entire lecture and I will most likely ponder it for my whole degree.

I like Ian’s idea of using e-portfolios as a tool to facilitate pedagogical narration. I have paper portfolios from elementary school, filled with art work, math tests, essays, and I absolutely cherish them. Having the opportunity to make an e-portfolio for every student means that the teacher can include videos of the learning process or the final project. This is highly valuable because learning cannot always be easily expressed on paper. This approach also shows that learning is unique to each individual and works exceedingly well with the new inquiry based BC curriculum. I love the idea of giving every student a detailed portfolio that documents their progress, but I do think that it would be a difficult adjustment for me as a teacher. Ian did say that experienced teachers can complete portfolios quicker than they complete report cards, but it is still a rather daunting task.

Maeve, Me, Chloe, and Ian taking possibly the most awkward selfie of all time. I love it.

Ian Landy’s blog: https://technolandy.wordpress.com/