Today was chaos. I'd made a commitment to support professional learning around Learn-Create-Share and digital immersion in our school, and suddenly it was time for a Term 3 focus on sharing. I didn't feel I had anything new to offer from my classroom practice.
After lots of brainstorming and thoughtful discussion with colleagues about types of sharing and the roles of digital immersion and authentic audiences, I decided to offer a workshop on Pinterest and collaboration. Had I used Pinterest for school even once ever? I had not. But I have been playing with Padlet with some success in each of my classes, and I knew that students often like visual rather than text cues. I had a window to do some experimenting with my Level 2 class before the workshop, or so I thought.
Last week I put the wheels in motion for Pinterest to be whitelisted for students and staff and I started to play. Yesterday there was still a glitch for student access which was sorted by this morning. This afternoon, utterly and precariously close to my staff workshop, my students could not access the Pinterest website.
Sometimes technology sucks. Even when you have superb IT staff. I came close to meltdown, and even chocolate barely touched the sides of my despair.
But we have fabulous, kind and flexible teachers at Grey High, and after a quick conference with those who had signed up to my session, I had a mandate to run a Pinterest session focused on staff collation and curation, with a side-serving of Padlet, and the knowledge that capacity for staff-student and student-student collaboration will come - soon.
It turned out okay. We had a whole hour to play with one tool, and teachers started to get enthusiastic. I got to talk Padlet where Pinterest wasn't working so well. I realised I'd made more progress with embedding Padlet than I'd given myself credit for. My students are not up for blogging right now, but they are participating with authentic audiences (each other) and it is rewindable through our class blogs. Here are some examples: Collecting and processing texts showing differing perspectives on controversial issues, Reflecting on the short film Fritters, analysing the pub scene in Day Trip (embedded below), and identifying and collating connected advertisements for the Level One connections unit.
My inquiry this year is focused on using learn-create-share to lift engagement in my classes. My next steps now are to develop and send out a survey to get student voice on exactly this, to augment the student voice on engagement and stretch collected by my appraiser when he observed me earlier this term. I am going to trial news ways of collecting resources (Pinterest) and presenting information (not sure yet, but something with paragraphs and mindmaps online) for my US25073 standard. And to walk on the beach more often.
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