Module 7 - Activity 9: Learning and collaboration online

People in the 21st century live in a technology- and media-suffused environment, marked by access to an abundance of information, rapid changes in technology tools, and the ability to collaborate and make individual contributions on an unprecedented scale. To be effective in the 21st century, citizens and workers must be able to exhibit a range of functional and critical thinking skills related to information, media and technology.

—Partnership for 21st Century Skills

(http://www.21stcenturyskills.org)   

Collaborative tools for learning in the connected classroom are important since they aid in collaboration in the classroom and across borders.  These tools may be either synchronous tools (allowing people to work together in real-time) or asynchronous tools (which facilitate work over longer time frames, where each member of a team may contribute at different times).  Tools can be used for authoring such as wiki and google doc and for brainstorming (google doc).

Module 7 - Activity 8: Communicating online

Communication tools for learning in the connected classroom ensures that learning takes place in an authentic real-world environment where teachers prepare the students fo the digitally, networked world.  Incorporating web 2.0 tools into classroom pedagogy ensures a learning programme that is meaningul and engaing for todays's 2st centure learners.

In Activity 8a I noted from the project examples I examined that students connected within the school, community and to the global community.  They communicated using podcasts, vodcasts, blogs, wiki, VOIP and they created illustrated books, calendars, food stuff, simulations and borrowed garden.

Activity 8b was rather interesting.   Our group connected through group e-mail, VOIP using skype and conference using vyew.com.  We really had a fairly hard time meeting especially because of personal schedules so we had to make quite a few contacts before we were able to really meet and collaborate.  When we met up and were well on our way we had challenges with the internet and we also found because we were not very familiar with vyew we found ourselves going between vyew (the unfamiliar) and skype (the familiar).  But we communicated and collaborated and were able to help each other learn a few concepts and ideas, retrieved lost pages on vyew etc.  We created and brainstormed about digital storytelling to a mind map.  Using digital storytelling tools digital stories were created.  See here for a sample story of historical sites around Antigua using one of the resources I analysed and subsequently appropriated. 

Using these tools during project could enhance communication by

• Attracting the attention of students and maintaining their interest. 
• Helping students to use their creative and analytical skills
• Enabling students to see new concepts and ideas
• Encouraging students to experience worlds beyond their own
• Assisting the students to share/collaborate
• Allowing teachers to reach every child at their level and style of learning
• Providing opportunities  for teachers to present complex ideas in a short period of time and at the same time allow students to learn while having fun
• Giving teachers the means of reinforcing concepts, sparking discussions, and helping students to assess their values and themselves.
• Helping teachers to connect students with events that are culturally relevant

Activity 7: Learning through social media

Will Richardson wrote in his February 2011 Educational Leadership article ,"Social media afford the opportunity for all children with online access to contribute to the world in meaningful ways, do real work for real audiences for real purposes, find great teachers and collaborators from around the world, and become great teachers in their own right,"

Outside of the classroom and on their own, students are talking, sharing, playing, learning, working with one another, expressing identity, discovering new friends and enemies, cultivating relationships, and pursuing common interests using social media.  It will therefore do educators well to embrace social media as an essential part to the curriculum since doing so will “limit the potential of students abusing the technology and it will also open a new set of valuable educational tools”.  

Some social media schools use include

• Skype: for webcam chats of community of individuals with similar interests and goals

• Mobile phone: for students to “exchange questions and answers with their teachers via SMS and browse classroom blogs for additional instruction. Moreover, as an efficient collaborative tool, students can quickly trade notes or take a snapshot of the blackboard for later studying” Greg Ferenstein Jan 10, 2010.

• Twitter: microblogging allows schools to send up-to-date announcements to students and discussions can also be conducted here.

• Facebook:  create facebook pages and groups for discussions, support, asking and answering questions.  Elementary schools may use edmodo, collaborative classroom, edublogs and kidblog.

• Youtube: for content sharing through video and audio. 

• Wiki: for collobaration

Some of my concerns are

1. Content found on wikis and blogs may not be accurate
2. Some social media may not be suited for all learners.  It is illegal for students under 13 to have a facebook account and mobile phones are banned in schools here in Antigua.
3. Students are able to process information and contribute to class discussions at their own pace, anywhere and place.  Majority of students at my school does not have internet access outside of school.

Module 7 - Activity 6: Real world collaboration

Real-world applications to classroom learning encourage students to answer a question that is relevant to them and engage them in solving a real problem.  This problem is solved over a period of time and across disciplines (Mathematics, Science, Language Arts, Social Studies) by the students conducting research using the internet or interviewing experts.

Module 7 - Activity 5: Engaging 21st century learners

For the connected classroom to be effective, the element of student engagement must be present.  What caught my attention most from this activity came in the understanding that e-learning in the connected classroom should allow a learner to:

• “relate — through collaboration and social networks
• create — through project-based learning challenges
• donate — through learning that’s grounded in real-world problems”

When combined with technology, engagement is enhanced since it facilitates interaction with others and provides an environment for critical thinking, communication and creativity which are essential for engaging 21^st century learners.

Module 7: Activity 4 - Knowledge Building

From this activity I learned that in a knowledge-building classroom, “learning is a by-product of the creation of new knowledge, but the focus of classroom work is the continual improvement of ideas”.  To engage my students in knowledge building I would

• Present opportunities for students to practice 21^st century skills

• Present them with real world problems

• Provide them with opportunities to create and build knowledge instead of presenting them with predetermined activities

•  Provide opportunities for collaboration and let students decide who they would love to work with

• Provide an online environment for students to record ideas so that they are always preserved and students can use them for self-reflection

• Act as a facilitator of knowledge as students direct their learning, research and create

• Provide an environment where learning is fun and students will want to be in that environment