Connect 2013

I attended the Connect 2013 conference with the 21C/AICT team and other representatives of the TCDSB on Monday and Tuesday.  

The conference is a 'Canada-wide' exposition of educational technology and 21st Century Learning.  Representatives of several Ontario school boards had booths and gave sessions that demonstrated how they were supporting 21st Century Fluencies the their schools.  At the TCDSB booth, I explained to visitors what the neXt Lesson framework was and how it is being rolled out in TCDSB schools.  I had some interesting conversations about 21st Century Teaching and Learning with some of them.

The majority of the booths were educational technology vendors advertising their products to the school board representatives.  The keynote was given by Robert Herjavec who discussed trends in technology and education (while promoting his company and book). 

I have highlighted some of the main things I learned throughout the conference below:


Blogging as a Portfolio

George Couros gave a talk on using your blog as a portfolio.  I like this idea in principle.  Its way more convenient and practical than a paper portfolio.  You can easily put the URL on a resume.  It gives the public an opportunity to comment on, critique, share and steal ideas: an absolutely essential part of PD!  For OISE, we were required to put together a portfolio containing examples of our teaching practice and teaching philosophy.  I think it would have been a lot more useful in blog format.  I could have started building it from the beginning of the year.  My classmates could provide me with feedback as it was built.  My biggest regret of the past year is that I didn't start blogging earlier!

Couros also talked about the great opportunities for students to start creating their digital footprint by blogging.  The feature I am most drawn to is how it is completely under the student's control.  They can carry whatever work/projects they choose over their school careers.  Couros did make a point of saying that he would never evaluate a student's blog.  This can undermine the awesome freedom of expression the blog gives to students.

I understand that blogging is just one way to create a digital footprint. It's just where I am going to try and start taking ownership of mine.

The Third Teacher

I had heard the term before but I wasn't really sure what it is.  Some of the members of the 21C/AICT team lead a poster session on the Third Teacher so I took the opportunity to learn about it.  From a discussion with one of the team members, the learning environment is the third teacher (a student's peers is the second teacher).  Its interesting to think about why I go to different places I go to study, read or write this blog. The Third Teacher got me thinking about what kind of environment would be most conducive to the learning I would want to happen in my class and what freedoms I would give your students in creating their optimal learning environment.  This ties into Bioregion Based Learning, an aspect of Sustainable Development Education that interests me.  It's something to look into and discuss more in the future.


Using Technology to make Learning Visible

This session gave me a few ideas for a classroom.  One of the activities the presenters demonstrated was how they took video and pictures (on iPads) of their kindergarten/junior students working on problems and then played the video or showed the pictures back to the students and their peers and asked them to explain what they or their peers were doing.  The idea was to improve metacognition among students as well as give the teachers a chance to share authentic data with other teachers and even parents.

Derrick Muller is the creator of one of my favourite YouTube science channels, Veritasium.  I recently read his Ph.D thesis is on Designing Effective Media for Physics Education, where he studies the effectiveness of a video exposition of lecture material, where the material is presented directly to the students by an instructor, and a video dialogue of comparable length and concept content.  The dialogue video portrays a student attempting to answer questions with a tutor.  On their way to the correct answer, the student encounters misconceptions which they work through with the aid of the tutor.  Muller's conclusion is that a student watching another student struggle through a question and working through their misconceptions is a more effective way to learn a concept than the concept being presented explicitly to them.

Though the presenters from the session were specifically talking about younger students, I think the idea of making learning visible through technology could be modified for a high school classroom based on Muller's findings.  Recording students working through problems or taking pictures of solutions and playing them back to a class could be a powerful way to address misconceptions and improve metacognition in a math/science class.  I haven't really thought through the logistics of how this would actually look in a class.  Alternatives to this are blogs (as discussed above) or using an app such as Explain Everything, where students can record what they write and say and play it back at a later time.  


21st Century Learning does NOT equal Technology

On Monday, I spent some time at the TCDSB booth explaining what the neXt Lesson framework was to representatives of other school boards and various technology vendors.  As I have discussed before, a common misconception is that 21st Century Learning just means using technology such as Smart Boards and iPads to teach.  I found this was the predominant feeling among attendees at the conference.  Although it was an educational technology conference, I was still surprised at this stance.  I explained that there is so far we can come (in the other 21C competencies) before even considering the use of technology and the fact that there are equity issues that come with the assumption that technology itself will transform education.