Day 2 Report

Day 2 of  conference reflections

I sit at a workstation overlooking Victoria Harbour.  When I registered for the conference and hotel stay, I wanted to be sure I could cancel should things change in my life.  As a result I booked my room under a “government rate”.  WHen I arrived at the Empress, to my wonderful surprise, I had been upgraded to a Suite!  How sweet.  I feel like a spoiled princess staying where royalty stays.  These accommodations certainly support my teaching and learning, the reason for which I have come here to AACE EdMedia 2013.

On my first evening after collecting my conference package,  began to follow tweets for what’s happening amongst conference delegates.  Luckily for me, I made new friend, HR, with whom I shared teaching innovations and we had a long walk through Victoria’s beautiful streets and gorgeous seaside paths.   

The next morning after a standard continental breakfast (with delicious chai tea!), we all attended a standing room only plenary talk given by Mitchel Resnick from IT.  He shared software MIT has created to promoted teaching creativity to elemengary school students (http://scratch.mit.edu/)  The purpose was for the MIT team to “create technologies that can make connections to powerful ideas and people’s interests”.  They encourage students to remix what’s there, give credit to the originator, and build ideas.  He was a very engaging presenter.

MOOCs

The next session I attended was regarding MOOCs (Massive Online Open Course presented as research results by Martin Ebner from Austria.  There are courses schools offer which can host up to 100,000 participants!  The benefits to students is that it’s free, they can learn, and network with others.  Benefits to teachers are that they can do marketing for their institute, their publications, and there is no marking required!  Assessment is by quizzes and group projects.  Instructors hosting the course choose how much to interact with students in the discussion forums.  Most students and teachers are “Satisfied” with these courses, but I would think that it would be pretty clear for anyone signing up  would already be kind of one of the “coonverted” and wouldn’t mind this self-regulated learning model. Ebner recommends having TAs in the course.

KEEGAN

The next plenary was delivered by Helen Keegan from the University of Salford, UK.  She was an innovative and brilliant speaker.  She shared with us a project she had done trying to inspire creativity and educational risk taking with her students.  SHe reported that since education costs so much, students place value on their education only when they get excellent grades. To change this model, she worked with a BBC reporter to build clues to her course getting students dialoging and problem solving and speculating on the meaning of the course and the process.  She engaged the students with outcomes such as “the harlem shake” and Britney anda for her #dudesdoingthebrittneypanda.  They watched the power of the hashtag and the trust the students had transforming in her course.  

When I see teachers come up with creative and innovative ideas and then present at a conference,I wonder where my niche will be.  Right now I am ageneralist, but would like to be a specialist where I keep honing my skills where not only students benefit, but colleagues do as well.  There seems to be a huge energy from these few people who are creating great projects.  Keenan reported she was sleeping only four hours per night.  Very rewarding, but a cost to one’s family if one has one.  She recommends making learning experiences that are not constrained, yet I wonder how to do this when one has a specific curriculum within which one has to deliver outcomes.  She also recommende creating a culture of “Let’s” and have students problem solve together.  Perhaps this can be achieved with a flipped classroom model.

FLIPPED CLASSROOMS

A friend of HR was introduced to me at lunch and as a result, I was able to learn about his field of expertise as an (Learning and Teaching Centre) LTC consultant.  Ryan Banow, from U Sask told us the results of his flipped classrooms project.  Students are to watch pre-recorded lectures before coming to class where they are tested and tasked with problem solving activities.  I know students are supposed to do pre-reading activities before class, but the flipped model seems like it would increase their class hours and wondering how practical it wld be.  Would students also read the required chapter before coming as well?  I still have a lot of questions about this model.  Ryan recommended using Camtasia to record the lectures, but then how interactive can they be?  They can’t.  It’s a very passive model.  I like the idea in theory, but I would like to dialogue this with my LTC rep at BCIT to see how I can make it work.  Maybe just ensuring the students are doing the readings before coming is an answer.

OPEN SCHOOL BC

Well I knew coming to this conference that I would be learning, and while this next piece I feel I should have known very well about before coming, I am now grateful for knowing about it now. www.openschool.bc.ca is and OER: Open Educational Rescoure for people who want to take courses.  I’m wondering if it is a MOOC or how much interaction there is with a teacher.  Monique Brewer from the BC Government presented the site and its features.  I have shared the link with my sons’ Grade 10 planning teacher becasue there are modules that I think highschool teachers can access and have students use in their face-to-face classes. I think as a parent in the district parents advisory council, DPAC, I should get to know more about Open School BC and potentially share it with other parents and teachers as well.

Other presentations that I had wished to attend had room mix ups, so I guess I should be grateful for all the knowledge and networking and multitasking I did get to do.  Listening to presentations, taking notes, tweeting and following tweets, checking out referenced websites are  activites I never did at the same time while I was a student.  It feels like a lot to focus on at once and, one certainly needs time to have time for the results of all the input to settle down in one's brain to see what it means and repurpose it for some purpose! Today I want to know more about learning how to incorporate twitter into the classroom so students can learn from each other, and communicate with me, and also network in their industry.  

Books

Throughout the day, I have begun amassing books for my reading list:  

Net Smart.  by Howard Rheingold on digital literacies.  

I kill giants.  Graphic novel for coping with adversity.