Coming soon to the P2PU School of Ed

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We are gearing up for an exciting summer at the P2PU School of Ed. (In case you’ve missed it, this initiative is all about free, open, peer-centered professional development for K-12 teachers).

Here is what we are planning for June and July. If you’d like to participate, please sign up. We’re also looking for co-facilitators for new groups and are always eager to get suggestions for new offerings.

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PhET Simulations for Science and Math
Description: PhET simulations are designed to provide an open exploratory environment that can be used in many different educational settings. In this three week course, you will learn about how the sims are designed, will examine some best practices for use, and will explore/create lessons you can use with your students.
Dates: July 9-29, 2012

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Global Dialog: International and Comparative Perspectives on Education
Description: This 1-month seminar is for educators, learners and parents who are keen to discuss and compare education systems from around the world. The course is divided into 4 modules each containing 1 or 2 short online videos, an optional reading, online asynchronous discussions and an optional synchronous discussion (via Skype) around the following topics: global definitions of learning and education, cross-country education borrowing and lending, educating the whole person, and creating sustainable education systems.
Dates: June 4 – July 1, 2012

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ePortfolios for Teachers
Description: A group to explore the use and development of online portfolios as a personal learning tool for teachers. We’ll look at what purpose portfolios can serve, different tools for assembling an online portfolio, what kinds of artifacts can be collected, and how more formal credit might be tied to portfolios. Participants will have an opportunity to begin building an eportfolio if they choose.
Dates: July 9-29, 2012

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Making Writing and Literacy Learning Connections
Description: If “digital” is how we write, share, and participate today and into the future, what does that mean for the teaching of writing and for learning?
Join a National Writing Project study group as we explore these questions together through our own experiences and those of the NWP Digital Is community. Each week we’ll focus on a different aspect of inquiry and practice related to writing, teaching and connected learning.
Dates: July 9-29, 2012

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Syndicated Education in Distributed Learning Environments
Description: In education, schools create coherence based on ‘Conceptual Orientation’ (i.e. sense making), illustrating how theories and knowledge are related.  Following the emerging trend of Distributed Learning Environments used in Networked Learning, teachers also need to include ‘Spatial Orientation’ (i.e. way finding) to answer questions like: Where do I find useful Learning Resources (i.e. salience)?  How are these resources interconnected (i.e. pattern recognition)?  What is the underlying message (i.e. trajectory)?  During this course, you will create, deliver and manage an educational event that aggregates the latest work from participants within the cohort into one location.  This allows Peer-to-Peer (P2P) learning and keep the work they do in their own Personal Learning Environment (PLE).
Dates: June 25-July 14, 2012

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Reimagining Developmental/Basic English Curriculum
Description: A design charrette for teachers, developers, content experts, and interested others to share, explore and create transformative practices, essential content and skills necessary for student success in college. This course, produced in collaboration with the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), will take a systems approach to examining current content, standards and assessments, invite thought leaders/practitioners to discuss emergent trends in curriculum redesign, collaboratively explore transformative approaches and the role of digital and social media, and technology, to improve access and success for any student needing remediation.
Dates: July 9-20, 2012

** UPDATE ** This course has been added.
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Curating Our Digital Lives
We curate our digital lives each and every day. How can we use curation tools, techniques and practices to support ourselves in our own learning and support youth as they engage in academic learning and production? Join this three-week-long discussion, facilitated in collaboration with the National Writing Project, to share your thoughts and to hear from others.
Dates: July 9-29, 2012

A hands-on online workshop?!?? Really?

On Sat. May 19 at 1:oo pm Eastern, I’m going to be doing a free online workshop on “Remixing Open Educational Resources for Your Classroom” (webinar link here) as a part of the Virtual 4T Conference. CEUs are available for this session.

You can register (free) here.

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This 2-hour workshop will be almost entirely hands-on (and online?!?!). I’m trying a new format. It will look something like this:

  • 15 minute intro – What is remixing? What is OER?
  • 1-1/2 hour – Using open content (a list of resources supplied), participants will remix for topics/lessons of their choice.
    • Everyone chooses a lesson or topic that they’d like to address. They will also pick a final remix format (web page, PowerPoint, ebook, movie, etc.).
    • Participants can work individually or in small groups.
    • There will be a shared wikispace where people can collaborate or post their work if they like (or they can use their own space).
    • I’ll be available for support throughout the two hours (and by email afterward).

The idea of doing an online workshop that is primarily hands-on with “on call” support available is new for me. I’m excited about it.

I’m hoping some great remixed, shareable content comes out of this! Hope you can join us.

And stay tuned for a debrief afterward on how this format worked.

** UPDATE **

This workshop went great! Here is an archive recording of it.

Analytics may not be the right measure

David Bornstein’s excellent book How to Change the World, which is about social entrepreneurs, the citizen sector, and the work of the Ashoka Foundation, concludes with a very interesting discussion of the use of metrics and analytics to value social enterprises. He says, in part:

Citizen groups and funders should remain cautious when embracing numerical assessments. The quest for quantifiable social returns or outcomes has become an obsession in a sector that envies the efficiency of business capital markets. Given this obsession, it is important to remember that numbers have an unfortunate tendency to supersede other kinds of knowing. The human mind is a miracle of subtlety: It can assimilate thousands of pieces of information — impressions, experiences, intuition — and produce wonderfully nuanced decisions. Numbers are problematic to the extent that they give the illusion of providing more truth than they actually do. They also favor what is easiest to measure, not what is most important.

Profound.

He goes on to say that there are many areas of society in which we accept informed judgement, rather than pure analytics, as the best way to make decisions, for example, in our court system with the standard of reasonable doubt.

Rather than just using analytics to judge social enterprises, Bornstein suggests that citizen sector research analysts might be employed to assess efficacy using a variety of criteria and ultimately expert judgement.

Some particularly important points to me in this discussion include:

  • By focusing on analytics, we naturally target our activities toward those numbers, not to our real goals.
  • It is hard to resist gaming the analytics, again to the detriment of our real goals.
  • Quality of service in the social sector is more than analytics.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but it applies to many things I am involved in right now. Online and blended learning. Assessment. Professional learning.

You can’t just boil those things down to numbers, and by trying to do so, we may be compromising our core missions.

Teaching with simulations

PhET is is an incredible collection of interactive simulations for math and science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. They are high quality, research-based, free, and open licensed. And they offer accompanying teaching resources as well.

If you aren’t familiar with PhET, there is a free webinar next week being offered by the Oregon Virtual School District.

Webinar link
Date: Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Time: 3:45 pm, Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, GMT-07:00)
Meeting Number: 928 566 534
(no password required)

Here are just a few of the interactive simulations available from PhET.

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