So after posting my reflection on how we use 21st Century skills in our teaching programmes, its been really great to see how and what other teachers are doing around the country. I was somewhat resistant about getting involved in the G+Community at first but am now finding it a great place to learn. I was super nervous about posting my thoughts (once they're out - they're out!) on the forum but it's been really positive. I am finding myself being drawn back to see what else is going on and seeing the examples of work, reflections and ideas that are being shared. Love it.
So Tuesday's session was quite hands on. We were looking at how we can incorporate more innovative technology into our classrooms and looked at a couple of models that support this incorporation. The SAMR model and TPAK. I found both models interesting but need to take a bit more time to reflect on these and my understanding of the key concepts and differences between the two.
One of the innovations we looked at was how mixed reality will/could/can be used in the classroom. I personally have created Aura's from the Aurasma Augmented Reality (app?/programme?) years ago. Note the key word- "I'. I haven't ever handed this over to my students who could have done some fantastic things with this application I'm sure. My focus at the time was: how can I make this into a cool sharing/learning platform for my students.
Grant Lichtman's Ted talk (What 60 Schools can Tell Us about Teaching 21st Century Skills), was a clip we had to watch for class. Initially, I didn't take too much from this viewing but am finding the ideas he presented in the clip, sneaking into my thinking quite often. One idea he speaks of is about the things that hold us- (teachers, educators, schools) back from becoming the progressive educators that really do equip our students with the skills they will need for their futures. He calls these silos, anchors and dams. Reflecting on why I never actually gave my students the opportunities to play around, suggest ideas and use Aurasma in the class themselves, was mainly down to some of those walls I myself had put up. This again related to the ideas in this weeks reading in prep for class Conditions for Classroom Technology . A weighty little 30+ pager *eyes sagging out of their sockets, but this was very thought provoking. Although quite old in terms of a tech paper, the ideas behind it still apply. What are the things that hinder the successful use of technology innovations in classroom? For me, relating this to why I never even gave my students the opportunity to use Aurasma in the class, was fear of it not being successful. Not all students had their own devices, the school didn't have the programme on the school devices, the internet was too slow etc etc. Although at the time these were very valid issues, basically it was too hard, so it wasn't even attempted. This is something I really need to think about and battle- what am I doing to limit the use and application of technologies in my own classroom practice? How am I using silos, anchors and dams to hide behind?
This then leads me into the ASSIGNMENT! OMG!! Holly and I worked on this for quite a few hours yesterday. We both want to do well on this assignment and it is going to be very interesting to see how this goes. The problem we identified in our practise was that students were not given the opportunity to share their learning outside of the classroom community. So although we both have home/school links to share digitally what is happening in our classrooms (we both use google classroom and Seesaw), when do students share outside of their family etc. An idea that was floated and didn't really go anywhere was H TV. A programme that would reflect what was happening in the lives of our students, the school and our community. Both Holly and I would like to step right back from this and truly allow the students to design and take charge of this project. This will be a BIG challenge. We will seek the feedback etc and ideas from students tomorrow about what ideas they have, whether they see value in it, and how they would like to see it run. We are also going to ask parents and other staff (the stakeholders). We are prepared for failure; there are many things that can go wrong but we are both willing to try and see this up and running. Where will it go?- we don't know. Teaching into the unknown- Grant Lichtman. Now we need to apply all the theory etc to our idea- hence the title of this post.
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