It’s incredible that Course 1 of our Certificate in Educational Technology and Information Literacy is complete (well as of midnight tonight it will be!)

Our final face to face session yesterday was a doozie!  Kim and Jeff organised for the authors of Reinventing Project-Based Learning – Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age (from which our project assignment stems from) to skype in.  It was very powerful to receive words of encouragement and advice from Suzie Boss (Portland, Oregon) and Jane Krauss (Eugene, Oregon)  Also impressive was the fact that they were giving up some of their Friday night to talk with us.

Take-aways from the conversation:

• If the technology (tools) is leading your project then go back and look at it again, make the learning lead the project
• 8 Essential Functions (Recommend that we read that section in the appendix – the tools will change and/or advance but the set of functions are enduring
• Visible Thinking – Do something that has students showing their thinking. When you do this you can get some dialogue going – ie: what are they doing and why?  By the time you get to the final product it’s too late to get into a dialogue
• Must check out The American Crawl – amazing English teacher with a great reflection blog.
• You don’t have a network for no reason.

One of the great things about Course 1 has been the chance to collaborate with members of my own Grade 5 team as we put together a Project especially after hearing the authors of Reinventing Project-Based Learning!!  We set ourselves a goal of establishing our Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions by 11.00am (Lunchtime for the Course).  It’s such a pleasure working with people who are willing and enthusiastic about learning in the 21st Century.

Julie Lindsay joined us via skype today too.  Sheis an IT Director, currently working at Qatar Academy, soon to be at Beijing International School.  Along with Vicki Davis (CoolCatTeacher),  Julie developed an amazing project-based learning opportunity for students around the globe based on the Horizon Project, The World is Flat and Grown Up Digital. Julie and Vicki have recently completed the first ever Flat Classroom Conference and have received multiple awards for their ground-breaking work. Her blog, E-Learning Journeys, is a wonderful resource for all things related to globally collaborative projects.  When I was teaching Year 7 in New Zealand (Grade 6) my class and I were lucky enough to be a sounding board for the Horizon Project in 2006 and 2007.  It was an amazing opportunity to be involved at a lower level.  My students got real insight into the kind of students that they themselves, in the not so distance future, would be.  It was interesting for us look at the ways other students communicated and collaborated and produced a final product during the Horizon Project as well as provoking a lot of discussion about critiquing people’s work / thinking.

The last part of the day saw us back together in our teams finalising our Project.  The GRASP was excellent as it kept us focused on exactly what learning we wanted to expose our students to.  We struggled somewhat with the “Six Facets of Understanding” because none of us really had any experience with this.  Having the template on our CoETaIL wiki helped a little, but we were unsure of what exactly to write.  This provoked some discussion about our own understanding and together we were able to nut it out.  Fabulous cooperation, contributing and collaboration!  You can read our Project Page here – although please note it’s still a work in progress.  We are going to share it with the rest of our team and have them add their input too, as we believe this has the potential to be a wicked Social Issues Unit for Literacy!  We welcome any feedback or suggestions you might have – just scroll down to the bottom and start a thread!

It really is hard to believe that Course 1 is complete.  The weeks went fast, the readings were thought-provoking, reaffirming and sometimes prickly. But that’s ok – we’re life long learners and this is what life long learners do – extend themselves, challenge themselves and learn new things.  There’s more photos in my flickr photostream of Course 1 if you’re interested.

Is my journey of learning continuing?
Crossing the bridge as I hit “publish“.

Bring on Course 2!