Learning, Teaching and ICT

This smacks of top-down central control to me, and, in my opinion anyway, will have the opposite effect to the one perhaps intended as schools will see GLOW use as an imposition from on high rather than being within the context of the school’s and student’s daily work and having come from them…I think it’s the fast track to less use of GLOW if it’s seen as a project sent down from on high..

I hope that schools in this authority will resist this, and find ways (of which there are so many) to use GLOW to support their own work in learning and teaching in a way thats contextual and relevent to their individual and collective needs as pupils, teachers, classes, age/stage groups and schools…”

I’m really glad that I made it clear that what I was writing was my interpretation of what was said, and that I might have heard only what I wanted to hear. I also added that what I was recording on the post may not have been what was meant by the presenter

Thankfully I was being ‘green’ last night and hadn’t thrown the original notes I took at the conference into the food bin. Having rescued them, I now see that what I wrote down for that bullet point was actually:

I have no idea what the presenter meant by that phrase or what context it was said in. I was scribbling down quickly what I felt could be relevant to my own situation. My scribbled notes also showed that I had added something on to the presenter’s statement. I had scribbled:

(VTC?!?!)

This is very significant to me  - because of all the things the presenter said, that one small statement saw lightbulbs flashing in my head. Isn’t it strange that the statement that filled me with inspirational ideas is the one that set alarm bells ringing in my twitter friends heads

I’ll try to explain why those lightbulbs started flashing!

I’ll begin by revisiting a post I made on this blog whilst researching for my Chartered Teacher dissertation. In a response to that post, Ewan McIntosh commented:

The notion of work patterns seems to correlate to the traditional classroom’s ‘routines’. If an online community is going to be successful people always need a reason to go back to it. This is where routines and regular ’special events’ help people have that kick into action in those parts of the course where motivation begins to flag. Is this what your tutor means?

Initially, I disagreed with Ewan’s thoughts. I wanted the children to have control over their own blogs, rather than have me directing them. I’d tried directing pupils’ blogs previously and it had failed because the class didn’t have ‘ownership’ of their own online spaces. I’d also approached Jackie Marsh via email and she backed up my thoughts when she said:

………….. I like the way you are letting the children drive the use of the blogs, that is so important if they are going to be successful…………

I think her advice is the key to achieving success when giving children in your class their own blog.

Later in the dissertation journey I wrote an Online Communities  blog post. I’d come across Gilly Salmon who believes that:

E-moderators need to give very explicit attention to enabling and promoting all aspects of online socialisation. To succeed in fully engaging the participants and promoting their active involvement, imaginative and creative images will be needed! Energies can to be harnessed towards the shared enterprise and purposefulness of the learning community. In a sense, e-moderators create a special little cultural experience belonging to this group at this time through discussion and negotiation”

I think it was only at that point that I began to understand what Ewan had meant when he left his comment.

One of my remits at the moment is to look after the Falkirk VTC website. I’m not an E-moderator by any stretch of the imagination - but when the presenter at the MIICE conference talked about ‘school-wide challenges being set from the centre‘, I wondered if the VTC  could be used as a vehicle to allow teachers to become more comfortable with  Glow.

How might that happen?

To explain how it might happen, I need to re-visit the Voices of the World project. The project is described as being:

a place to connect educators around the world.
This network was created by Sharon Tonner, now a University Lecturer, to connect children together using their voices rather than the written or typed word. It was also created to enable children to develop an appreciation of different languages, accents and dialects from around the world.

But what it also did was to introduce teachers to freely available online sites like Voki , Animoto … and a whole host of other sites that have the potential to enhance teaching and learning experiences. Because the learning tasks were very basic, the class teachers were able to concentrate on ‘getting to grips’ with the online tools - and it soon became apparent that they were beginning to use these tools in their mainstream lessons, too.

So …… is the VOTW model one that could be used here to introduce teachers to Glow??