Reflective Learning Walks in an Online Classroom

Learning Walks are a reflective practice where teachers get the chance to observe other colleagues in a non-evaluative non-judgmental setting.  The teachers doing the walk through are looking for specific objectives and noting how they are met.  "The walkers are the learners. The focus is not on the teacher but on what the walkers are reflecting on and how they will improve their own practice."

Typically a learning walk is lead by a person who is good at keeping on task and steering conversation away from evaluative or judgmental comments. The leader will take about 4 other teachers through others classrooms in the following manner:

·         10 minute walk through a colleague’s classroom.

·         2 minute debriefing in the hallway (Sample Reflective Online Learning Walk Discussion Guide)

·         10 minute walk through another colleague’s classroom.

·         2 minute debriefing in the hallway

·         10 minute walk through another colleague’s classroom.

·         2 minute debriefing in the hallway

·         15 minute large group reflection (Sample 15 Minute End of Learning Walk Reflection ‘I Statements’ ,scroll to last page)

In no way are reflective walks meant to be evaluative or judgmental.  They are simply for reflection of what best practices are occurring and the ‘walker’ reflects on what they see from their other colleagues to improve their own practice.

What not to say during a 2 minute debriefing:

·         I liked how…..

·         I didn’t like when….

What to say during a 2 minute debriefing:

·         I saw…

·         I heard…

·         This seems evidence of…

·         This leads me to think…

·         This supports the learning of the teacher or students by…

·          Source

In an online classroom I see this process as working in much the same way.  Rather than physically walking through each person’s classroom you could as a group of observers be given a set amount of time to log in to another teachers course. Then as a group you could still ‘walk through’ a course and have a 2 minute debriefing among the observers then move to another colleagues online class, debrief, then end with the reflection for the ‘walkers’. 

For reflective learning walks to be effective there needs to be a specific objective that you are looking for and observing.  In online learning there are so many places one could start:  clear objectives set out in course layout, community/presence, teacher voice, clear curricular objectives, connections to real world, connections to previous knowledge, etc.  The key will be in deciding which objective you will be looking for.  If I wanted to see how teacher presence in an online environment is demonstrated well then I would contact teachers who demonstrate mastery in this area and do learning walks through their courses. 

Resources

If you scroll to the end of the following link you will find a section from the book Creating a Sense of Presence in Online Teaching talking about how cognitive presence, social presence, instructor presence, announcements, strategies/cooperative activities, instructor support, logistical presence, and one way instructional presence are central to creating effective online learning.

As well the last page on this link contains a sheet with ‘I Statements’ for the 15 minute reflection at the end of the learning walks.

The document below is an excellent resource for how to do Learning Walks with Templates for teachers when walking through face to face classrooms. It-itlearningwalks

Digital Curation/Content Curation in K-12 Education

There is a grand shift in resources available for students today.  Long gone are the days when the school library, which only contained books or magazines, was the only source for students to do research.  Filtering out what books you needed was a simple as asking the librarian where the section was on your given topic.  Today students have a plethora of resources at their fingertips on the web but the problem becomes how do they collect and filter through those resources in a meaningful way.  Content curation has become a powerful method for students to be able to think critically about what information is important and to organize the material in a way that makes sense to them.  It is also provides an opportunity to engage more of the learning styles of the students by having visuals for all of the content that they are collecting.

"Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing and displaying information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest." Wikipedia We have been asking our students to curate information in the form of research papers, bibliography's, posters, powerpoints, etc. for a long time, we just haven't called it curation before.  With the emergence of powerful web tools we are now able to have our students become curators in their learning in the digital world through Digital Curation.

I could spend an entire week researching and presenting different tools for content curation and still not have even scratched the surface.  Below I have included some links to a few different digital curation tools.  Finding the one that works for you may seem like choosing a random candy from a box  with your eyes shut but you have to start somewhere.

The basics for digital curation (once you have chosen which tool/platform you will use) is to

• Decide on a topic.  For example, World War 1.  It is important that you don’t have a bunch of content just thrown up all over your page. 
• Research and collect relevant key resources. Quality over Quantity.  This is where the filtering comes into play.  If you do a Google search for World War 1 you will get over 500 million sites.  That can be a bit overwhelming so make sure you are search savvy. 
• Narrow down what you are looking for into categories.  Sticking with the World War 1 theme, you could look for personal war hero stories, time lines, pictures, countries,  etc.  Then start with 3 good resources under each category.
• Upload your own original content.  Do you have pictures, documents, or a blog that is your own unique content?  Perfect, don’t forget that you have great resources to share too.
• Curate your resources.  Make it clear with whatever tool you are using what the content is.  If you are using something like pearltrees.com  then use relevant pictures for the covers of each collection.  Remember that a Content Curation is a rich visual tool.
• Share your curation.  Once you have done all that work in creating your specific content curation make sure to share it with others.  You know how we teachers are, let’s make it easy to find others resources, we all need a little help! Share, Share, Share!

I see content curation being used in education with students as an alternative or in addition to a bibliography.  Have your students create a content curation for any given topic and then have them upload relevant resources, videos, pictures, documents, etc. on their curation page.  This is the relevant piece for the student that will actively engage them in their learning and allow them to critically think about their resources and not be limiting to just text for their information.   If I were teaching a braiding unit in Cosmetology I might have them create a section on pictures of exemplars of braids, a video section with tutorials, and an ‘I’d like to try’ section.  That way rather than having me spoon feeding them the information they are finding content relevant to them and they become investigators  and invested in their own learning.

For a teacher content curation would be a great way to organize your own resources for your students.  For younger grades or to direct them to the specific sites and sources that you have you could create your own content creation.  Share your content creation with parents.  In many content creation tools there is the option to have others suggest resources to post on the curation, open that up to students and parents to give suggestions.  The possibilities are endless.

I know for myself a content curation page is so much more engaging and I remember more about what I have read in a visual format rather than just having a list of websites pasted in a Word document (ironically I have a list below).   If the sound of Content Curation scares you, start small, try it will just one assignment as see where it takes you. 

If you have any examples of assignments or resources that you use in your classroom with digital curation please share them below.  I am very interested to see how others are using content curation and your comments on it’s effectiveness.

Simple and Effective Content Curation Tools for use in the classroom:

• pearltrees
• scoop.it
• Kapsul
• Pinterest  There is an excellent article here on The Pinterest Guide for Teachers

Top 10 Free Content Curation Tools for Teachers

The above list is by no means exhaustive, I just thought I would give you a small few places to start so that you aren't overwhelmed.

Other Resources:

Here is a link to a Content Curation on Content Curation tools using Pearltree

How to be an Effective Digital Curator
Below is what embedding a content curation using pearltree into a blog looks like.

Building Consensus for School Wide Professional Development

If you are a teacher then I am sure you have experience the same debates at your staff meeting on various school policies such as to wear hats or not to wear hats, to wear bandanas or not to wear bandanas, to have a mandatory sunshine fund or not to have a mandatory sunshine fund..... You get the idea, the issues are endless and getting consensus nearly impossible.  So how then does one go about deciding on a common Professional Development goal?  If we can't even decide if the students can wear hats or not in school how are we going to decide our yearly common professional development?

I was recently at an iNacol conference and was at a session that addressed just that.  It was so mathematical that it was brilliant!  It involved two surveys that the staff had to complete that took into account everyone's preferences and ideas and amalgamated the two into a solid number at the end that was hard to argue with.  I will try to explain this process as simply as I can (and it is not a difficult process which is what makes it so brilliant!)

Survey #1:  What is important to you as a staff?
Decide what is important as a staff with regards to professional development.  Make a list of 10 items (could be more or less but 10 is a nice round number).  The items could be things like: relates to other division initiatives, time efficiency, ease of implementation or data collection.

Below is a picture of a sample survey with just 3 items:

If everyone on your staff completes the survey and weighs the importance of all the items on the list then all you have to do is total the average weight for each category (Google forms will do this for you so you don't even have to get out your calculator for this stage:) and use that weighting in survey 2.



 

Survey #2: Use the Weights from the first Survey and apply them to each idea for Professional Development.

So let's say that of the three items my staff chose the average weights are as follows:

• Relevance to other division initiatives  8.2
• Time Efficient 9.5
• Easy to Collect Data 9

And as a staff we brainstormed the following professional development ideas:

• Incorporating Differentiated Assignments within units
• Incorporating Videos within each assignment
• Providing Choice for topics of study

We would then make the following table and have each staff member fill it out and find their brilliant number for each Professional Development Idea:
Incorporating differentiated assignments within units

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Weight (from survey)
Relevance to other division initiatives							X				8.2	57.4
Time Efficient						X					9.5	57
Easy to Collect Data										X	9	90
The Brilliant Number!												204.4

 

If you total everyone's Brilliant Number for each idea, the highest one wins!!

Everybody's ideas have been taken into consideration and the importance for each person has been taken into account, and voila the numbers don't lie.  The idea with the highest number is the best solution for the year and everybody's happy:)

I thought the idea was simple, precise, and was considerate of everyone's needs.

You can find the original slide show presented by Dan Tenuta and Kris Keckler: Best Leadership Practices by clicking the link.

Actively Engaging Online Students

By Michael Surran (Flickr) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

 

I recently had the privilege to attend the iNacol conference in Palm Springs.  For the next few blogs I will be summarizing my learning from some of the sessions I attended.  Please feel add any comments or suggestions below.

Session 1: May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor:  Igniting Students’ Hunger to Learn

This was presented by the staff at Treca Digital Academy .   I encourage you to look at how the WeeblyPages for their connections staff are set up for student and parent support the information in their websites on note taking and study skills alone is worth the look.

There was great information about how to engage with students with surveys that are used frequently to gain a bit more information about the students and then using that information to engage and respond to students interests throughout the course.  Some surveys included:

·         A parent survey

·         An initial contact student survey

·         A Future story survey (quite a neat idea to get students connecting what they are doing now to what they want to do in the future).

·         Multiple IntelligenceSurveys

Some of my favorite quotes from the presentation were:

Relationship Building:  all learning is double-coded, both mentally and emotionally.  How you feel about something is part of the learning and your openness to learning.  Most learning is in essence emotional.  Virtually all learning starts with a significant relationship.

                Stanley Greenspan and Beryl Benderly

and

Family involvement strengthens student learning and improves academic achievement.  Students with active family support have better attendance, pass more classes and earn more credits resulting in higher grade point averages and higher test scores.  As a result, they are more likely to continue their education beyond high school and learn social and behavioral skills that help them at home, at school and throughout life.  We want to keep parents actively involved in their student’s education by giving them needed resources, involving them in student activities, asking for their input, as well as, keeping them informed as to what is going on…

Which lead me to question how can I/do I  build relationships in my classes with students? And how can I build better family engagement with my students?

At the beginning of all of my courses I have my students e-mail me with the time they have scheduled for their classes and then I send back a Welcome to the Course e-mail encouraging them to contact me any time.  I also have a discussion board at the beginning of each class where the students need to upload a picture of them selves, share a bit about themselves, and welcome other students to the class who are posting as well.  I like this initial approach as it gets them engaged with me and lets them see that they are not the only one's in the course. I don't use the 'coffee house' approach with the discussion boards anymore, mostly because I rarely had any students use them so I removed it to clean up the front page a bit.

I could certainly do more incentives for my students such as sending out prizes for reaching certain goal points and I could showcase more student work on the main page of the course.

 Below is a list of ideas that I would like to try that wouldn’t take a huge amount of time as suggested at this presentation:

·         Student and Parent Goals through Surveys

·         Multiple Intelligence Preferences

·         Incentives: send out prizes for reaching certain goal points

·         Future Story survey

·         Remind 101

·         Parent Survey
 

Please add you comments below about you engage your online students.  If you are a student please post any suggestions that you may have about how we can engage you in the courses you are taking, and finally if you are a parent I welcome all of your suggestions on how you would like to be involved in your child's online education.

Summary of Learning EC&I 831

As my semester of EC&I comes to an end I have summarized my learning in a whirlwind 5 minute youtube video.  It was difficult to say everything that I wanted to say to summarize my learning in five minutes.  Aside from the video I wanted to add how the slide below really summarized my learning in this course.

This was a slide that came from Alec's video slides on week 5.

In the diagram the Course Management System (CMS) is represented in comparison to the Personal Learning Networks.  In the distance learning courses that I have taken as well as have those that I have delivered the CMS model is the one I have experienced.  It certainly was a whirlwind of information and a quick learning curve where at the end you left your course community behind.  Of course there were always those people that you work with that in the CMS's that end up in your PLN but they were more the exception rather than the rule.

I have always enjoyed my courses with the CMS model.  I learned a  lot in a short amount of time and always knew what the end goal was.  I was always able to tailor the assignments to meet my needs and I knew how long, how many, and the marking rubric for every assignment.  It met my needs very well.

Dave Cormier spoke on one of our classes about Nomadic, Worker, and Soldier learners.  To be honest I am not sure I am ready to be a Nomadic learner and I am not sure that we should all aspire to be all the time.  For what Alec was asking us to do in this class, namely to make this class your own, one had to become a Nomadic learner to some extent. There had to be a period of floundering around in circles for a bit until we decided on our direction, until we decided what our learning path would be.  We weren't given rubrics, expectations on the number of blogs and responses, or even topics required to study.  We were simply asked to make this course our own without limit to our creativity and needs.  That sounds pretty Nomadic to me and I wasn't sure I was ready for the trek.  I have to say that as much of a paradigm shift this was for me, I think I get it now.  This was the type of learning that you couldn't possibly predict the outcome lest you squash the potential of what it could be for each person. 

It has become clear to me throughout the class that Alec has been trying to get us to develop our own personal learning networks.  This class has been a catalyst to set us on our way through creating traffic to our blogs and creating a support network through twitter.  Twitter certainly added to my sense making and way finding in the class.  We will take this network with us when we leave the class rather than comming together for a brief period of time and then have the community die out when the class is done.  This has been a huge paradigm shift for me and I feel that I am only just starting to realize the potential of the gift of having my own Personal Learning Network. I am thankful that we will be leaving with this community rather than leaving it behind. 

Thank-you to everyone who posted on my blogs and for everyone for having such great blogs to learn from as well.  I cannot thank everyone enough for their participation in my journey, whether it has been through leaving a blog comment, tweeting information, or sharing your journey.  I am looking forward to a continued journey.

Alas, here is my five minute summary of my learning in this class.  Keep in mind that this is a finite artifact for the beginning of my infinite Personal Learning Network.

Major Digital Project EC&I 831

Well my last master’s class is coming to an end.  It is bitter sweet as I am not sure where I will find something else to fill the energy that has been created.  I worry that there will be a void left, or that I will not find the time to continue on my lifelong journey of learning.  I know that I will always be a lifelong learner but will I challenge myself to such high standards as have been required throughout the last year and a half?

In any case for EC&I 831 we had to create a major digital project of our choosing.  What I decided to do was to create a blog for my school.  In my PLC we have been talking about how to increase student success in online learning and one of the items that we talked about was how to generate community with the online teachers throughout the division.  It was our hope that the blog would support our online teachers and empower them to incorporate best practices in their courses that will create a learning community and help to engage students ultimately leading to excellence in learning.

            Ok, creating a blog is not the issue, which is about a 10 minute job.  How do we get online teachers to buy in?  I wanted to create a blog for our school as it would fit the needs of this major project and also the needs of my PLC but this wasn't something that I wanted to be mine.  I wanted this blog to take on a life of it's own where each cyber school teacher felt ownership of and wanted to contribute.  The first step in making that happen was to have our principle talk about the blog at our video conference staff meeting.  She let the staff know about the blog and that we would be discussion some of the posts at our meetings.  The first meeting we had generated some interest but we ran into issues such as schools not being able to access blogs. 
           
            The content of the blog to date has ranged from teaching practices such as creating meaningful online discussions and how to get participation in online classes, to providing useful resources such as how to site Creative Commons pictures and how to do a proper bibliography.  Many of the articles that were presented on our school blog I took further and elaborated on them in this blog such as using the CREST model to write Effective Discussion Board Questions.

          I did create a place on the blog for commen assessment items but I it has not been added to and at this point I am not sure if there is interest.  I will leave up the tab but it may have to be another initiative to get people to post resources to the blog.  Right now the focus is on generating traffic to the site and getting people participating in the discussion.  There is also a site for plagiarism resources with a few items there.  I added a document on how to use compfight and imagecodr (information from one of our ECI class sessions) as well as a good website that explains what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.  Again, I am not sure at this point that people see the blog as a place to get resources but as long as we are generating discussion then I think that we are on the right track.

There were initially two of us committed to posting to the blog and trying to generate interest.  I tweeted the blog each time a new post came up and my principle would send out an e-mail to all of the Cyber School teachers.  At our school staff meetings we were going to go through the book What if your ABC's were your 123's.  One of the other staff members suggested that we post up a summary of each of the chapters on our blog as we discussed them.  This seemed to be the turning point for the blog. 

The first blog entry on the book was done by our school math lead teacher and she did such a good job (and I think she enjoyed writing it) that we volunteered her to write each of the blog entries for the book.  I e-mailed out to our entire division the blog telling them about our chapter summaries, since it is a book that our entire division is suppose to be reading. Our technology  teacher sent an e-mail out to the publisher of the book to see if the author wanted to post to our blog, and the rest is history.  We had our last staff meeting and there was excellent discussion around our division math initiatives and the blog supported that conversation and learning. 

Where as I still post to the blog on average of once a week, reply to each person’s postings, and try to generate traffic through twitter and e-mail, the blog is not mine.  It truly has taken a life of its own where other people have taken ownership and are looking forward to creating that professional community. 

Our school blog can be found at http://chinookcyberschool.wordpress.com/