eLearning Infusion

Further to my thoughts on whether teachers should have their own eportfolio, I have spent some time reading up on the Registered Teacher Criteria which have begun to progressively replace the existing Satisfactory Teacher Dimensions this year.

The Criteria are designed:

It is suggested that evidence against the criteria can be gathered a number of ways including;

1. Observation: formal with structured feedback and next steps.
2. Discussion: including meetings, structured mentoring, critical self-reflection.
3. Documentation: collections of evidence including reflective journals, analysis of learners assessment, records, PD

Needless to say, an eportfolio would be the perfect container for bringing all of these elements together. What a great opportunity for school leaders to ‘encourage’ staff to create an online space as an authentic collection of evidence and critical reflection to demonstrate successful teaching.

I do have a couple of questions/challenges for the NZTC:

1. Instead of providing (i.e. Word templates) which use a text based solution for teacher self-assessment against the criteria, why not provide an online tool that allows teachers, school leaders etc. to access, revisit, comment on where teachers are at? Sure, lots will do this using Google Docs, but how could we be more proactive in getting teachers online, creating PLNs, and using the tools we all expect our students to?
2. Why is there no mention or modeling of how this evidence will be collated? How exciting would it be if the NZTC gave us access to an ePortfolio account using Mahara through myportfolio or similar. Or is the old process i.e. evidence is text based, printed out, highlighted and sloted into clear files still OK?
3. My concern is that we have a new set of criteria, so change going to happen already, but we are not going to make the most of it. Why not grab this opportunity to move this process into the 21st Century with the use of some collaborative learning tools?

Don’t get me wrong, I have no complaint at all regarding the criteria, gathering evidence, critical reflection and discussion. I can see them dovetailing quite nicely with a Teaching as Inquiry approach. My questions are more process based about packaging this up in order to ‘present’ your professional outcomes.

And… it is not all doom and gloom. If you watch the Part B of the introductory DVD, portfolios do get a mention. I just couldn’t catch if there was an ‘e’ on the front…

Also, I wasn’t able to attend any of the provided workshops for this, so maybe these points were discussed..?

I’ve been teaching a while now and I have never found the perfect way to plan and organise the learning that I am intending to get through in a term. I have always found it really hard to show the links between learning areas and contexts which mirrors they way that they are actually taught and facilitated in the classroom. The degree of integration and intertwining of ideas and concepts is really hard to get across in your traditional table form. That lineal approach doesn’t really suit me nor does it represent what actually happens.

So this term I decided to try a different approach to my planning and unit overviews which was more suited to the way I think and approach planning learning over a term. Most importantly it needed to show the links between different projects with much more clarity than a Word or Pages document.

I have this vague idea or concept that if a teacher plans their units of work separately and in isolation to each other then that is how they are more than likely to be taught in the classroom. Having a way of planning that encourages you to see the big picture and integrate concepts and themes together is surely going to encourage a more authentic integrated curriculum delivery. Maybe someone has done some research on this somewhere…

The exploration started with using FreeMind, an fantastic mind mapping program, free, and  available for Mac, Windows or Linux. I have been a long time user and supporter of Inspiration in the past but I am just loving FreeMind and what I can do with it. Even better is that FreeMind files are a supported format for uploading, editing and sharing online on such sites as MindMeister.

Here is an example of what my planning overview for the term is looking like. It is a work in progress, as any of my planning is, taking direction from the students as and when required. It gets squashed up a bit when it is embedded but you’ll get the general idea. Just in case my appraiser is reading this… this isn’t the only planing I do! Comments appreciated!

Today I had a really good discussion with some other staff from school. We were discussing the best solution for pooling together the wealth of information teachers often collect individually to help facilitate a new learning context, especially web links and tools.

The discussion came about from the teachers’ use of forums, used to generate discussion around their personal goals, progress and feedback from mentors, of school and EHSAS cluster goals.

The forums are starting to be used for more than just of goals, and teachers are throwing in web links and ideas, not directly related to the forum topics. You know what it is like, throw a bunch of teachers in a room and they’ll talk shop, jumping from one idea to the next with a bit of personal news thrown in. Transfer this to a forum environment and you know what I mean.

Does this unorganised jumble of links needs to be addressed? Reorganised to allow easier access to the links? Or should we just leave it as is?

Some other questions raised:

1. Do teachers want to have a list of elearning resources (i.e. web links) gathered for them before a context of learning is about to begin?
2. Do teachers generally find these resources a week before they need it, when the plan it, or just in time?
3. How do they access or find them? Word of mouth? Delicious? RSS? Googled?
4. Should we expect teachers to understand RSS? subscribing? news readers?
5. Do we need to teach specific skills related to the use of online forums?

Lots of questions and to be honest, we came up with no one-answer-fits-all solution, or if there even needs to be a solution.

What is important is that teachers are engaged and active with online forums to support, improve andss share their classroom practice. That is just great!

Futurelab is one sight that I often visit even though their RSS feed from their Projects page zips into my Google Reader automatically.

I recently revisited a project named My-E, which initially caught my interest after reading the project pdf:

The central aim of this project is to pilot an idea which aims to strengthen the ‘personal learning networks’ of young people – creating and strengthening the links between parents, teachers and others significant to the child’s learning – and to encourage dialogue within this network that will form the basis of more personalised learning pathways.

While the My-E project is directed at 5 & 6 year old students, it has a number of commonalities with the underlying themes and aims of this ePortfolio project. In fact the whole ePortfolio project was initially based around the idea of creating a community of learners, fostering a greater shared understanding for learners, their parents and staff of formative practice.

Our ePortfolios can facilitate, as described in the My-E pdf:

how digital technologies can be used to document, enable and enhance meaningful two-way home-school dialogue

and additionally dialogue between students.

I looked forward to reading the results of the project which begins classroom trials in August of 2008.