Saturday, April 23, 2016

Professional Development - Connect use in 2016

I was asked to do a Connect beginners session (a social networking/LMS/feedback/calendar/submission portal developed by the department) at the local group of high schools PD session.  I said ok, I can train anyone in anything given a little knowledge of the product and how it is applied.  Generally speaking, people like the sessions, will sit through them and try to learn.

Connect though is a funny beast.  It's reasonably mature and is being used by students and teachers. It works now, it's not a bad time to adopt it as long as there is a commitment to keep developing it by the department.  There are issues with it though that have nothing to do with the software.

Firstly, teachers need to understand it does nothing without a commitment to it.  By this I mean if you want it to work, you (as teacher) must clearly define what you want it to do in your classroom.  When I used a similar portal (Edmodo) successfully I had a clear idea of what I wanted it to do for me.  I wanted to extend my reach beyond the classroom to assist students when I was not physically present. 

I had a commitment to Just-in-time intervention, a strategy that requires responses when the student requires it.  This required my solution to evolve as needs arose.  The skill I required as a teacher was to keep these intervention events in the classroom and maximise learning time outside of the classroom.

I started by attempting a flipped classroom and blending my learning with ICT.  Edmodo (like Connect can do) provided the glue between the instructional sessions (designed by me a few lessons in advance on a tablet and posted online or during instructional periods in class on an IWB later posted online) and response sessions.  I made a commitment to my students that I would respond out of hours (if I was available - generally after my kids went to bed) to provide solutions to problems students experienced in attempting classwork.   Simple things I could prompt with short text answers, curly ones I would explore using a graphics tablet and record my voice to show how I explored the question and derived an answer.

Now that they were familiar with the programme I introduced materials from other sources that they could access with new topics, Khan academy topics and mathsonline were great for this.

Then I added quizzes to provide formative feedback, things like exit statements from lessons or readiness percentages for tests and assignments.  As other teachers became aware of the success, they tapped in and started answering questions for my students and I did the same for theirs.  This also provided prompts to revisit topics where confusion reigned.

The great thing about one of the classes is that my time teaching reduced considerably, the students would ask me to sit down and not teach.  I think this was because we managed to plug more holes this way, they started to answer each other's questions more frequently and they were more capable of independently learning, confident that if they became stuck, help was available.

Each step, I explicitly taught to students.  They had to understand what it was for - there was no learning by immersion or osmosis - if they didn't know it was there or how to use it, it might as well have been just another useless page on the internet.

Going back to Connect - this is the sort of thinking that has to sit behind it's use.  Connect is useless if it has not purpose in (or out) of the classroom.  I used all sorts of tricks to get them using a portal initially, but with some perseverance they became the easiest to teach and the highest performing class I have ever had.  I'd like to think what I learned could be used by someone else.  I know at least one person has it figured out and continues to evolve their own solution.

How do I teach that to 60 people?  When I was researching it, my supervisor concluded it was me not the ICT use that was successful.  I'm not sure I agree with him, but enthusiasm for teaching is infectious - it could be the forming of a synergistic class/teacher relationship (with high levels of confidence in their teacher) is the result of ICT usage rather than any benefit derived from the usage itself.

I don't know.  Wish me luck!

3 comments:

  1. Hi Russ, stumbled across your site in my research of a WA initiative, an interesting read. Keen to chat more if you've got time?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Seems like a great thing that you have done this kind of idea in terms of giving their students some ideas to learn and on how are they going promote more opportunity for them.

    ReplyDelete

Hi, thanks for leaving a comment.. it's good to hear what people think!