vid entry page - this could be interesting to have a close look at. It has a learning plan system.
9:37 just spend time talking to one of the students and Jo. It was really good to catch up.
Today basically what I hope to do is chuck my time a better than what I’ve done in the past.
General outline
- email in and out
- phone calls
- china
- prepare work – bush foods
- ten days
9:57 ah it seem like I’m getting somewhere, nearly got all small bits and pieces off my to do list. !!!!
10:33 moving on to working on the china, no one was around to talk to !!!!
11:46 nearly got thru most of the admin stuff, I’m off to talk about building and mounting projectors, which is something I had plan on.
12:35 China stuff done I’m off to lunch now after I write the next email message.
2:39 Today has been way more productive than my last DOTT day tracked, even got my planning for Thursday done. This means I can more on to, get some of the more long term things done. Eg the call for projects, But because of meeting it doesn’t look like I’ll get the assessment work for the tigers eyes project done.
Carnegie Foundation - Knowledge Media Lab (KML) - KEEP toolkit
This could be a really great tool into the future.
From the site "Knowledge. Exchange. Exhibition. Presentation.
The KEEP toolkit is a set of web-based tools that help teachers, students and institutions quickly create compact and engaging knowledge representations on the Web.
With the KEEP Toolkit, you can:
Select and organize teaching and learning material to illustrate some of the critical aspects of teaching and student learning.
Prompt analysis and reflection by using templates that provide conceptual frameworks, categories, and guiding prompts/questions.
Transform materials and reflections into visually appealing and intellectually engaging representations that can be easily shared online or in print.
Share ideas for peer-review, assessment, collective knowledge building, and others purposes to advance teaching and learning as a community of practice and reflection.
Simplify the technical tasks and facilitate the evolving intellectual processes involved in knowledge building and sharing. "
The Fishbowl: Short Presentation on Blogging
Ok, I said I would only spend around an hour doing TAFE related work today and I have nearly used that hour of time and I maybe haven't done what is most important thing yet.
This week overall has been interesting.
Tuesday notes
- Group work is not easy for both the students and teacher. They finally seem to have realized that webCT could be useful to use in the process.
- We need to do another web project, I'm going to use learning plans this time. We might do the bush foods brief and I'm going to suggest a few people do the negotiated brief. Also I'm going to use learning plans with these guys to support this project.
- It was really great to be able hand one student a disc with the screen recording on them so they can watch them at home. Flexibility at work !!!!!
- I'm going to attempt to use the mailing list to try to build a bit more of a community feel, and to expand the class time beyond Tuesday.
Thursday
- things are humming along. It's nice to have a change from doing web design.
- The negotiable projects seem to have created a lot of excitement !!!!!
- The software demo situation of. Short demo and then task is working really well. I had people join in that wouldn't have normally be interested in doing a monkey see monkey do situation !!!!!!
- I don't like doing the projects where someone 'wins' I'm not going to do that again if I can.
- this group thought SMS news messages could be OK, I did beam some of them vCAL events for the video project. They thought this was sort of fun.
Accessible Rich Media: a Reframing the Future project
Community Groups includes dreamweaver and fireworks intergration.
From the site: "The Index of Learning Styles is an on-line instrument used to assess preferences on four dimensions (active/reflective, sensing/intuitive, visual/verbal, and sequential/global) of a learning style model formulated by Richard M. Felder and Linda K. Silverman. The instrument was developed by Richard M. Felder and Barbara A. Soloman of North Carolina State University."
From the site: "ID Online is a professional development resource for teachers and developers who want to become skilled in the instructional design process, and its application to online resource development."
islandstate - islandstate Student Screen FestivalConditions are much the same as last year. Less the 5 minutes and must have an image of Tasmania in it.
Back to working on my MAC, the screen feels so big.
What I really want to do before the week starts is write up some notes about
the last two days of teaching.
What I do differently next time.
I found this really interesting, and I’m going to attempt to transfer some of my hand written notes into my blog so that I can refer back to them in an easier way. One reason why I liked the session was the way it was presented eg as research finding. She stated the context, the questions, related worked, and what they had been doing.
Some of Salmon’s reasons for developing e-activities where.
- e-activates are cheap and easy
- teachers don’t need any much support (eg no need for designers and developers)
- text based
- learner is engaged
One of the key areas she talked about the problems of time, both for teachers and students . While students would like a full flexible system, this just is really not possible and often doesn’t help students actual complete the course. But pacing is important as well. Long courses need times when people can catch up. Salmon suggested about 30 activities over 5 weeks could work, and about 6 activities at time. With f2f students her suggestion was that 1 e-activity a week should be enough. The ratio of students to teachers they used is 15:1 and the teacher shouldn’t be working with more than two groups at a time.
The important thing is that time should be structured.
Other important factors are the building of community and Autotelism. Autotelism is a new term for me. It’s partly about study of happiness and the concepts Salmon saw as being important to e-moderating are:
1) Turning threats into challenges
2) Create focus, by short terms goals
3) Close attention to the group they are working with
4) Vision of group success, eg why are we doing this
One note I made at this stage that is interesting, their course only have around 2 minutes of reading before a student needs to act and communicate.
Hmm one thought I had at this stage was that I could transfer some of the practise of e-activities into my design students blogs tasks.
Features of a good e-activity are
1) Illustrative title.
2) There is a spark (a challenge or something that simulates).
3) There is a request for individual action.
4) Then there is some group discussions.
5) There is an elapsed time to do it, eg one week
6) Then the teacher summarises the discussions after the elapsed time
Types of Sparks
1) No more than at a4 attachment.
2) Visual/video/audio.
3) Knowledge footprint eg past posts.
I could see visual sparks working extremely well with my students.
The examples that where shown often had the sparks etc separate from the discussions. And the different parts of the message are color coded.
Student self evaluation should be part of the process, Salmon later talked how most the courses she has been involved in the assessment task have been keep separate from the discussions.
Here is my summary of the three stage model:
1) Motivation and participation, and overcoming technical and other barriers
2) Socialisation
3) Info Market – the stage where people are sharing information. But no real learning is happening at this stage. TIME starts to be because a issues at this stage
4) Knowledge construction
5) Meta Cognitive – eg students knowing how they are learning. At this stage students might be directed to web resources outside of the course
One of the key ideas I got from this videoconference was the idea of using metaphors as method of getting students to talk about group work. Because most people will not talk about how a group is going, but they might talk about a metaphor for the group.
I can see how many ideas Salmon is talking about are workng the online facilitations course that I’m doing at the moment. In terms of apply this to my teaching. I could convert all those written questions I’ve been asking the students to do into e-activities, the blogs tasks could become more like e-activities. I would if I could start doing some these things with my current groups of students ? maybe I try when I start the next project.
PDF is online at http://elrond.scam.ecu.edu.au/oliver/2003/tastafe.pdf
Hmm - the fun things we do on a Saturday afternoon.
K notes are also in her blog.
The key message for me was the keeping instruction separated from information. I can see how this could work for me. In many ways because of time I’ve been reusing ‘learning objects’ for a while. But I could organise is this in better ways into the future.
Also I didn’t realise the toolbox search system has a basket feature. This will be useful into the future.
Oliver talked also about the use of reusable learning designs. The website for this project is online at http://learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/- Information and Communication Technologies and Their Role in Flexible Learning
The generic set of fives design that project developed are
Next time I’m design a projects from my students I should make sure that refer back to this site. I can see some of the designs working well in parallel to studio based learning/teaching.
SCORM could be the solutions to my plans of custom resources for each students depending on existing knowledge and learning style. But SCORM doesn’t work with current version of WebCT we ITT uses. But there is a SCORM extension for Dreamweaver.
What I will change into the future.
Ahh I just seemed to have lost a day doing TAFE related work when I should have been working on other projects.
Macromedia - Developer Center : Animation Killer Tips for Flash MX 2004 hmm I should make sure I read this before the first years start using Flash.
From the site:
Question: "How do you get an all Flash website to rank well?"
Prepping Flash sites for search engine success
Here is the entry from my blog in the online teaching course.
"Well I'm now at the point where I feel a bit behind. I'll try and spend sometime working on the posts tonight (I've using my parnters wireless laptop so I can watch television while I'm writing) hmm that will not do a lot for grammer.
Now I'm at stage where the first bit of exictement about the course is over and now just feels like part of my life and part of what I need to get done each week."
Here are some general notes on todays teaching experience.
hhm. This group work is interesting. I'm starting to see myself having to spend more time dealing with team conflicts and these conflicts seem to me to be partly created by people being a different levels and people feeling the course should be aimed at a different level. In hindsight I would have give then students a few simpler projects to start with. I can do this when we start using Flash.
On another note I think we might need to do another HTML web project before we move on to using Flash. I still don't feel like students are at the skill level I would like them to be at.
One thing that did seem to work was the session using the dreamweaver project handouts. Where I basically talked them thru how someone else approached and built a site. It felt an odd of thing to do and I think it worked for some students. It didn't make a good video session. I need to look getting a louder level in from the microphone.
In terms of team work. They worked better in their teams today partly because people sat in different spots and the fact that I (and other one of the students) talked about what was going right and wrong. I actually think in the future I will let teams make some these mistakes because I think it was a good learning experience. But I don't think they are enjoying it.
l'm making these notes on my palm which always feels a bit odd. I just read Merrils article on learning styles. For me the key message was that the instructional design methods comes first and then that is customized for different learning styles and l would then also say that good instruction should cater for multipe learning styles. Merril does seem to down play learning styles but his position is that the first princples of instruction are more important. This is leading me to ask where does a student centered approach come into this eg custimised learning experiences for individual students. ?
9:22 hmm got here just on 9:00 and running late because a student I haven’t seen for a while is actually here. Also need to looking after another class while she goes to the doctor
9:55 got most of my small email task done and I’m now working on getting some files ready to be sent to one of the clients the students have been working with. I have a meeting at 10:30 and there is some prep work I would like to do before that as well.
12:22 back from the meeting, finally and starting to pick up the thread of what I was doing. Also supporting the class next door.
12:34 just seem to have lost another period of time talking and walk around the corridors.
1:57 ahhh got the some of stuff I need to do for Friday organised, but there will a number of things to deal with closer to the time. But I haven't got any prep done for the week yet.
2:15 finally feel like I’m getting somewhere the prep work that has to done or has been done for Tuesday. Now it just needs to do the photocopies.
3:33 hmm where has the last how last hour gone. The photocopies are off but way more needs to done than what I have time to do. I might get the project briefs for video done which could be great. Just filing the learning plans at the moment.
4:00 off to a staff meeting
8:20pm maybe this was not good thing to do. What could change in future.
Chunk my task together more
Do the prepare work first and the admin work as a secondary thing.
Don’t do three day off teaching a week and attempt to do a course at the same.
I should do this tracking thing a few more times into the future.
EditStudio - Professional Video Editing For Everyone - could be a cheap alternative
Howstuffworks "How Video Editing Works" hmm looks good but it doesn't seem to be working.
Free Adobe Premiere video editing software tutorials
Creating Digital Images from Video Clips with Photoshop and Premiere
Creating Digital Images from Video Clip
Using Adobe Premiere to Output Video to the Web
Using Adobe Premiere to Output a Video to the Web
Adobe Premiere Tutorial - Project Settings for Premiere
Windows Movie Maker Tutorial - How to Capture Video
Premiere < Adobe < tutorialfind
Online Adobe Premiere 6 Training Courses & Tutorials - learning the easy way
Wrigley Video Productions - Adobe Premiere 6.0 Tutorials
Hmm. It’s been an interesting week. I’ve tried a few new things some of which have worked out other haven’t worked. With Tuesday group when I did a software demo in the morning I did a screen capture of that. Which has already been useful because the student that didn’t get to class until 12:00 could watch it in the afternoon. What I’m having a bit more of a problems with is getting it up online in a nice streaming format. Part of the problem is I cann’t work with the windows media file on my MAC so I can get the into flash so I can use the flash video player stuff.
I talked quickly to Steve Brain about streaming video on the TAFE network and he has got Flash Communication Server up and running internally at TAFE and he has give me his Flash file to play with. He has also come to the conclusion that Flash Video and Windows Media files might be the best solution at the moment.
With the Tuesday groups that are working the best are the group that is physically working close to each other. Next week I will encourage people to sit close to their team members. The teams are not quite working in the way I expected there is not a lot dialogue or actual group work. Also in the timing for the project I didn’t account for the longer time need to talk about the idea’s thru. I sort of thought group work would make the project quicker to do, but in actual fact it might make it slower to do.
With the Thursday group the day was a bit chaotic because I spent the morning at the Merrill video conference. In afternoon I had my first go of using learning plans with student, which some of them where worried by. But it was great to talk to everyone about where their skills where and how they thought it might be best to gain skills in that area. I think this is going to work. One thing I need to change is some students put done “other” and the wrote learning from Robin. Which I thought was quite funny. They didn’t realise that Software Demo’s and Coaching where “Robin teaching us”. Hmm
Notes on the Merrill videoconference.
This was interesting, it was great to see him used examples that related to software training. It confirmed what thought, you help students do the project using the software not help the students learn the software. In many ways thing such as problem based learning, and real life task are things I’m already doing. But I realised that I’m still spending some time telling students what they need to learn eg my powerpoint presentations.
The big thing I’m going to change is I’m going to have a series of project/problems that build the student up towards the final real task. In the past I’ve just had that finally real task and tried to show the students how to do that. The students need more of a more structured introduction to the project. I’ll start this next week with the video project.
The other thing that the videoconference confirmed was my belief that I shouldn’t be using multiple-choice questions to check for underpinning knowledge, and they my approach of software demos being about doing the problem should work.
Urls: http://www.id2.usu.edu:16080/MDavidMerrill/
From the site "MOBIlearn is a worldwide European-led research and development project exploring context-sensitive approaches to informal, problem-based and workplace learning by using key advances in mobile technologies." hmm I wound if the the PDA people at TAFE know about this project.
Workshops by Thiagi, Inc: The Source for Training Games
and Interactive Experiential Strategies this site is quite nice because has a great list of ideas each with only a short summary.
Well I should have got started on this a while ago, but late is better than never. Basically what I want to do is spend some more time reflecting in writing on my teaching experiences, this is part of my PD for the TAFE's flexible learning champions program as well. Also this is all a bit of spell checker free zone.
Started the Online Facilitation Course with Gippsland TAFE today. Now I know what it's like for students to open their email and find 30 email messages and feel like they need to read them all. One thing I've got already is a possilbe icebreaker game.
1) Posting an image to the group – maybe that image being only a flat area of colour
2)Then each member of group has to make one change to the image, before the next
person works on the same image.
So it’s basically a visual version of the Chef’s Hat. What concern me is that this might take to long.
One thing I'm discovering quite quickly is alot of people that are interesting in teaching flexibly are still quite critical of the whole area eg the debate on the first workshop day about what the group should actually be called.
Australian Flexible Learning Framework - New Practices in Flexible Learning - Port - Ability
Port - Ability: Integrated Learning Options, Skilling people, growing business, building community