I am regularly asked to run professional development days for schools and in the July holidays I was asked to work with the LEAH STEM Action group in the Adelaide Hills.
It was an absolute pleasure to work with them to explore technology through Multiple Lenses. I ran three sessions with them covering:
- Speaking Pedagogically ( Exploring the role of ICT as a pedagogical tool for removing barriers for learning)
- Designing Digital Thinking – in which we explored how we all approach the process of creating solutions for problems, what the design process should involve and what it is that we’re REALLY assessing in Digital Technologies as a curriculum area. We also connected our learning from session one by considering how we could use technology to remove barriers to our students learning and our own assessment and work loads when trying to capture the thinking processes of our students
- Resources and Ideas. In this session I showed them the code connection tool in Minecraft EDU (I made sure they could all make it rain chickens 😉 ) We looked at how we could add sensors and use excel with a great add on called data streamer, to turn the task we’d completed in session one into one that involves science, maths, engineering and technology. Teachers were given time to play in this session and I was able to give them temporary access to Minecraft EDU to allow them to explore this for themselves..
It was a really great day with some really great learning conversations. Here is a photograph of some of the thoughts buzzing around. I captured these during a activity I call “The gallery”. I placed images around the room, with post-it notes near by, and ask the participants to write down what the images made them think of. This was completed after the first session on Speaking Pedagogically.
n this photograph you can see that as a result of my initiating a professional discussion (in this partnership forum) around pedagogical content knowledge, the teachers are evaluating their practice in selecting ICT tools and considering how they impact upon the educational outcomes of students. I have been sharing with them and are asking questions that will improve their teaching practice. This activity has clearly assisted them to consider how they might select ICT resources to better engage students in their learning by removing learning barriers. This is particularly evident in the statement “Technology solves a problem so.. how does it enhance learning?””
I received some great feedback from this session. One of the things I love being able to do is providing the attendees with answers to their personal queries and barriers. I received several emails at the end of the session asking for further links and advice and was able to direct all of their queries and answer their questions. Here is some of the feedback I received from this session (Click to enlarge)
