The context of my learning is a mixture of
- Teacher related – about 30%
This is my 7th year teaching VCE History Revolutions. This year’s class is small but focused and the students participate in the learning process, with each other, and with me. The year most of my current students were in Year 9, I took two classes of Year 9 History (Australian Curriculum). This was also the first year that our school had 1:1 devices and year 9 was the first year level targeted for their adoption. I documented this whole learning journey at a blog that was shared with these students at the time: http://9hist2012.wordpress.com/ . Luckily for me this was also the first year we could allow mobile phones to be used in class – but only when we had an explicit task in mind. I had students collaborating with absent peers on their phones through Facebook chat, active participation in finding relevant information on an at-need basis and experimenting digitally. My class, in many ways, is my testing ground.
- Teacher-Librarian related – 60%
A great role that fills most of my working week and waking hours, and gives me licence to dabble in all curriculum areas in our school (and beyond) – and which is only limited by the time I have available. I can develop skills and use them to assist all members of our college community, create web sites, curate web links, teach, purchase resources etc. I can also share professionally with my teacher-librarian colleagues.
I am looking to learn more about why I do what I do and how this impacts on pedagogy. Some interesting reading I have come across already since we commenced our learning journey in INF530 is:
- Figure 1: knowledge tools -an important consideration for learning. (Pang, A 2008)
Like so many things we come across as educators, the consideration really needs to be the learning outcomes that such discoveries empower in our students. Figure 1 links to an article (Pang, 2008) which makes for interesting reading in terms of our course material. (It is downloadable as a PDF also).
Information that we come across needs to be considered in the light of the Gartner Hype Cycle:
- Figure 2: A visual reminder of how many educators view technological innovation. (Sharples et al., 2013 p. 6)
Figure 2 refers to educators’ reactions to educational innovations such as educational television, integrated learning systems and virtual worlds (Sharples et al., 2013 p. 6) . MOOCs are currently considered to be at the peak of inflated expectations. (Sharples et al., 2013 p. 6)
References
Pang, A. (2008). Knowledge Tools for the Future. Retrieved March 2014, 2014, from Institute For The Future: http://www.iftf.org/our-work/people-technology/technology-horizons/knowledge-tools-of-the-future/
Sharples, M., McAndrew, P., Weller, M., Ferguson, R., Fitzgerald, E., Histr, T., & Gaved, M. (2013). Innovating Pedagogy Report 2013; Open University Innovation Report 2. Retrieved March 15, 2014, from Open Access UK: http://www.open.ac.uk/personalpages/mike.sharples/Reports/Innovating_Pedagogy_report_2013.pdf
Margaret Simkin 
A very information rich blog post for your ‘official’ blog post’. Now my challenge to you is to make sure that you also write lots that is not ‘official’! It is such a great thing to make notes and reflect on your own discoveries and see how you develop. there are no right or wrong answers – but silence is not so good 🙂 Make sure to watch the video and set up some organisational strategies so you can focus on your reflections.
LikeLike
Hopefully I am not too silent overall, although I have had several goes at getting the blog expectations correct. (I have had spurts of blogging prior to this but, generally speaking, I see it as my weak suit). I find the forums very informative and have visited regularly. I also spent some time on the weekend reading blog from the blog roll and commenting on other people’s posts. I have enjoyed Tweeting with #INF530 and have touched base with the Google hangout – which seems to offer very powerful options for networking and collaborating. The course so far has been stimulating, challenging and occasionally overwhelming, and it is certainly keeping my mind engaged on a series of “what if” questions! I am currently “chasing” David Weinberger all over the Net and grappling with some of his ideas on Library organisation. I guess I have to get my thought processes out of my head somehow – and this blog is the obvious place.
LikeLike
I know! I’m very aware that you have been active, and am delighted to see your engagement. But for your own sake, don’t lose the value of your thinking, information encounters and more…pop thoughts into your blog. There is no right or wrong..there is only evolving ideas! You will be glad of it later I’m sure!
LikeLike