Choice and Voice: Cultivating Personalized Learning Strategies for Assessment and Reflection
Students as Curators:
Now What?
I'm willing to adapt any presentation / workshop to your needs. I can extend or condense any workshop and develop it to be as hands-on as you like (I love making things with participants!) My fees are negotiable and can be discussed via personal contact.
More and more educators are becoming enthusiastic and adept at curating resources for their course and own professional development. But what about our students? How can we encourage students to cultivate a positive digital presence (and be “Googled Well” as Will Richardson says), by allowing them to curate content for their courses? This session will not only discuss the “whys and hows”, but the “so what nows?” Once students collect relevant content, how do they make it meaningful for themselves and others? How does their curation contribute to peer learning and how is it reflective of their own? We’ll explore practical ways to get your students curating and using their curation to enrich your course and their learning.
In an age when most information is “Googleable” how do we craft assessment tasks that allow our students to demonstrate creativity and critical thinking? How can we give them opportunities to both demonstrate their learning, and their ability to apply their knowledge? This session explores some unique assessment tasks and the (mostly) web-based tools students need to accomplish them.
All the assessment and reflection strategies presented will be driven by the need for student choice and voice in their presentations of knowledge. All are based on one or more essential questions, which are open enough to apply to a variety of subjects. The session will offer tips, tools, and examples of a variety of non-traditional projects such as vlogging, blogging, digital storytelling, “artifact bag” analysis, social media curation, multi-media presentations, and website building.
Video blogging is a refreshing way to transform more traditional assessments such as essays into creative, student-driven presentations of knowledge. This presentation will offer tips, tools, and examples, including a variety of styles such as Common Craft, RSA animate,documentary, stop-motion, screen capture, and the ubiquitous "talking head". You will find that when students vlog they are generally more passionate about demonstrating and reflecting on their learning, and even the more timid individuals can often gain confidence, allowing for a different perspective on their progress.
Storytelling is an integral part of our personal and educational lives. We share micro-stories everyday on a variety of platforms, yet frequently fail to recognize the hidden poignant tales embedded in the hashtags and status updates. This session will explore some innovative uses of social media tools (Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, Storify, etc.) that can lead to story creation or “storyfinding”. Since social media is inherently social, many of these projects involve crowdsourcing and collaboration. Inspire your students’ creativity, learning, and cultivation of web literacies - the possibilities are endless. You can even emulate some of the ideas in an analog fashion for younger students.
It might sound like the Parisian Left Bank but it could be your course. What are the Whys, Hows and Wows of crafting your course into a blended experience? How do we best harness the power of the Open Web’s tools and resources to achieve a truly personalized learning environment? How can the structure of cMOOCs play a role in shaping how students learn, both collaboratively and independently? How do we decide what the balance of Face-to-face, synchronous, and asynchronus learning should be? This highly participatory workshop will allow you to experience a variety of authentic tools and strategies as we examine the structure of such a flexible, student-centric course, designing with the analogy of the “Cafe”, the “Studio”, and the “Stage” in mind. We’ll explore the role of curation, remix and crowdsourcing and the subsequent “new literacies” involved when we exploit social media and other open resources for educational use. You will practice vlogging and backchannelling, and see how such activities can facilitate critical reflection, participatory culture, and higher-order thinking. We’ll discover ways to promote radical transparency and assist students in amplifying their work and connecting with experts in the field. The combination of curation, creation, reflection, and amplification leads to the cultivation of a positive digital presence, where students not only consume but contribute to knowledge production.
This workshop requires participants to have a mobile device and (preferably) a laptop. High-speed bandwidth is necessary, as we will be accessing multiple social media sites and uploading small clips to YouTube. Participants will be highly active in engaging in relevant activities they can replicate in the classroom (MS-Higher ED) and using design thinking to develop an action plan for implementation. A full website of resources curated by the presenter is available as a take-home “goodie-bag”.
#onceuponahashtag: Storytelling and Storyfinding with Social Media
