always learning

As part of the ADE Institute a few weeks ago, my fabulous team developed a globally collaborative project (soon to be featured on the Apple Learning Interchange). Seeing as I have made my fair share of mistakes over the past year or so, and given my taste for detailed lists, I figured I could contribute a step-by-step guide to global collaborations.

These are the things I think I should do at the beginning of any globally collaborative project (not that I’ve always done them in the past, but maybe the new list will help):

Define Project Goals:
The first step to any successful collaboration is communication. Spend some time – over several days or weeks – discussing what you hope to accomplish and how you might go about completing the project. Make sure that all teachers have time to touch-base with their support personnel in school to ensure that they have the required materials or support. Think about:

• What standards do you need to meet with this project?
• What would you like students to understand?
• What are your essential questions?
• What kind of authentic task can you design for your students to demonstrate their understanding?
• What supporting activities or tasks need to be completed to help your students construct their understanding?

Develop Explicit Expectations:
From the outset clarify what the expectations are for all teachers and students involved in the project. Think about:

• Time commitments
  • Will this take 1 lesson or 12?
  • Is one lesson 45 minutes or 90?
  • How often do your classes meet?
  • Will students need to work outside of class or can everything be accomplished in class time?

• Scheduling requirements
  • When are your holidays? What is your school year (Aug – June or Jan – Dec)?
  • Do you want common due dates and times, or flexible dates?
  • Will students be required to complete specific tasks for their collaborative partners by a certain class lesson?

• Task breakdown for teachers
  • Who is responsible for what?
  • When do your tasks need to be completed?
  • Who will be relying on you to finish your work?

• Technological Requirements
  • What kinds of technology are needed to complete this project?
  • What access do teachers and students have? Are you 1:1 or do you have 1 computer per classroom?
  • What kinds of peripherals will students want to use? How can you leverage the materials you have to benefit all students (perhaps splitting the work so that the school with more access to peripherals completes different tasks)?

• Communication needs
  • Will students need to communicate in real time at any point?
  • Do your locations enable you to achieve that during the school day? What is the time difference between your time zones?
  • If you can’t connect real-time, what are the expectations for communication? Daily? Weekly?

Develop a Communication Structure:
It makes sense to have one common “home base” for your project, whether it be a wiki, or a Ning, or a blog – one space where all students and teachers will go to connect with their global partners, one place to store all assignment requirements, one place for all announcement and news, one place for all student artifacts. Items to consider when choosing your “home base”:

• Protection level
  • Does this space need to be private, protected or public – this has implications for student safety and parent notification
• Tools needed
  • What kind of things do you want students to be doing?
  • Does this project require discussion forums, or is threaded discussion by page more appropriate?
  • Are you looking for a tool that supports media uploading, or are you planning to host your media somewhere else?
  • Do you want your students to have a space that is “theirs” or do you need to keep the focus on something specific?

Determine Assessment Methods:
When students are working collaboratively across great distances, it is especially important to clarify, explicitly, at the beginning of the project, how students will be assessed, including specific assessment tools. Take time to:

• Develop criteria and rubrics
  • Be sure to post completed assessment tools on your “home base” so that all students and teachers have access to them.
• Clarify the process of how students will complete the project
  • What stages or steps must they go through to complete their project?
  • Are parts of the project going be outsourced to different schools based on their resources, location, or experience? How will this be coordinated?

Design Matters:
A good rule of thumb to keep in mind when completing a globally collaborative project is that other teachers may want to look to your completed work as an example, therefore it is essential that your page layout, navigation, and materials are as complete as possible, and easy to understand – even for non-participants. You might want to think of the “home base” as a complete artifact for the entire project – teacher planning, assessment tools, communication strategies, student works, and feedback – so that your “home base” can be a stand-alone resource for teachers around the world. Think about:

• Having an “about this project” page describing what your goals are with the project and who is participating.
• Having a “participating schools” page to coordinate the schools and students that will be collaborating.
• Having an “assignments” page to place all assignment requirements.
• Having a “students” page for all students to link to their personal online environments.
• Having a “contact us” page to give teachers, students and parents a way to contact you for further information.

What do you think? Am I missing anything?

Tags: 21stcentury, learning, global collaborations, step-by-step, guide, PD, ADE, adeasia2007, apple, ALI,

Over the past few months Justin, Dennis, Annelies, Struan, Teresa (our elementary curriculum coordinator extraordinaire) and I have been working diligently to develop our essential understandings and essential questions about 21st century literacy in order to develop a workable framework for authentically embedding technology into our core curricular units of study.

It’s been a long process, but we’ve started to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a new curriculum planning practice – one that authentically embeds technology from the beginning.

We started with developing our essential questions and enduring understandings:

Effective Learners

How do I find and use information to construct meaning and solve problems?

Students will begin to understand:

• The necessity, values, and methods of reflecting throughout the information gathering process.
• Why and how to effectively search for, evaluate, select, analyze, interpret, and synthesize appropriate information to problem solve.
• Bias influences the creation and interpretation of information.
• People use their prior knowledge to learn how to build new understandings and deal with any new technologies.

Effective Communicators/Creators

How do I effectively communicate?

Students will begin to understand:

• Purpose and audience for communication determine the appropriate media choice.
• Design and layout impact the quality and effectiveness of communications.
• People reflect on, organize, analyze, interpret, and synthesize information in order to effectively communicate and create ideas.

Effective (Global) Collaborators

How do I responsibly use information and communication to positively contribute to my world?

Students will begin to understand:

• Communication networks are powerful mediums to spread positive change or to negatively impact others.
• People use information and communication tools to learn from each other, innovate and collaboratively problem solve.
• Communication behaviors and actions impact the access and safety of users.
• Everyone is biased and that bias is based on each person’s life experiences.

Next, we took a look at the way teams plan their units and developed a framework that will help teachers understand how technology can naturally fit into their curriculum.

Our goal was not only to show the process for embedding technology, but also to ensure that teams use the backward design process in their unit planning.

We’ve broken down our framework into two stages:

Prior to the unit:

• Planning: Essential Questions and Enduring Understanding: Examining the goals and expectations for the unit so that overarching essential questions can be framed.
• Assessment Planning: Determining which tool is best for the job: Developing a summative assessment that addresses the essential questions and enduring understandings, examining the possibilities that technology can offer in a summative assessment.
• Unit Building: Backward planning, looking at the big picture: Developing the overarching framework for the unit, structuring how students will construct their understanding during the course of study.

During – After the unit:

• Practical Implementation Planning: lesson by lesson breakdown, booking resources and specialists: Ensuring that all materials will be in place for each lesson, as needed.
• Formative Assessment and Differentiation: Ensuring that the needs of all students are met throughout the course of the unit.
• Reflection: What did students learn? How do we know? What do we refine for next year? Taking time to evaluate the unit while it is still fresh.

At this point, we’re actually starting to plan units in grade 5 and grade 4 following this process. Teresa has taken the current units of inquiry and looked for a larger conceptual lens to view the topic – for example our current unit of “Australia” has been shifted to “Influence” – to help students construct overarching understandings, as opposed to staying focused on one specific content area. She then developed the essential questions and enduring understandings for the unit and presented them to the Social Studies representatives for the team.

Once we had their go-ahead for the general unit concept, Justin and I stepped in to brainstorm possible digital literacy skills that would allow students to effectively construct, and then communicate, their understanding about the topic. We created a “student sample” for the teachers to understand what the final product might look like, as well as specific teaching instructions, step-by-step guides for the students, and time and resource requirements. Our next stage is to present all of this information to the team to see what they think.

Although this process has been far more formal than I’m used to, and has taken much longer due to the large number of people involved, I can clearly see how well-planned and well-thought out this unit will be. We have individuals looking after the social studies content, the pedagogical approach, differentiation, Blooms Taxonomy, the 6 facets of understanding, technology and 21st century literacy. It just makes me realize how much is involved in curriculum planning, how much it takes to do a good job, and how important it is that unit planning is truly a collaborative process.

Tags: 21st century literacy, globalcitizens, collaboration, learning, creating, vision, philosophy, understanding, framework, embed, technology, curriculum, planning, development