Using Google Apps for Education (GAFE) offers many opportunities to develop new ways to approach curriculum delivery, instructional design, providing feedback, assessment … well, you get the picture – OPPORTUNITY!
At 2:30 p.m. EDT (today, October 17th, 2015) Andrew Bieronski and I team up to deliver a session at the Ottawa GAFE Summitto dig into this topic from a WRDSB perspective.
If you would like to join us remotely, we will be sharing our session via @Livestream (free account needed to view)
Note: the stream will be activated approximately 15 minutes before the session.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend and present at the Cyber Summit 2105 conference. I was thrilled to be partnered with Jonathan Schaeffer, a Distinguished University Professor of Computing Science and currently the Dean of the Faculty of Science, at the University of Alberta for the presentation topic: Are MOOCs Past Their Peaks?
I began the session by sharing the 2 year journey of OSSEMOOC, a learning community supported by OSAPACwhich I co-lead with Donna Miller Fry. (@fryed)
Jonathan shared his perspective and insights on the MOOC movement, noting that while it is only a few years old, it has already had a tremendous impact on teaching and learning. Although some of the original hype surrounding MOOCs has not been realized, the reality is that they are here for good and are influencing institutional thinking.
In reflection, although the perspectives we each presented represented significantly different contexts, some very interesting commonalities emerged. In summary:
teaching is all about meeting the students needs (not limited to the teacher’s needs or comfort zone)
MOOCs do, and will continue to play a role in moving learning forward
MOOC’s are playing a disruptive role along with other technologies
Educators own the responsibility to keep exploring new possibilities (including with technology) to achieve the best possible learning experiences for students.
There is an important need for “mini moocs” that needs to be recognized and acted on
Building a quality brand matters
My slides for the OSSEMOOC portion of the presentation:
Hats off to the organizers of the Ed Camp Hamilton event – great turn day, great turn out and awesome conversations. I really enjoyed the positive energy of a professional learning event where people chose to attend and brought their opens minds – wonderful!!!
I wanted to share a few resources from the event so that the learning and ideas continue.
The twitter stream is captured online via Storify.
Archives from the live streaming are now up on YouTube. Enjoy these deep conversations:
This post combines the slide decks and resources from the 2 English Association sessions on the April 17th professional learning session into one presentation.
I experienced a wonderful virtual learning opportunity this week with some fantastic educators from ADSB. Donna Fry, who was leading the learning sessions on site, invited me to provide a kick off presentation to their day. My task was to ignite some change thinking by linking the areas of technology enabled learning, technology change and bringing collaboration into eLearning.
I loved the idea of doing a virtual keynote – what a perfect way to “walk the talk” in terms of connected learning and modelling what we need our students to do.
While there are a variety of tools one could use for this type of activity, we settled on Google Hangouts (GHO) for our session.
Of course, the technology all worked flawlessly <big grin!> – a good demonstration of technology creating a natural flow of sharing.
I really enjoyed being able to participate in a timed table talk opportunity following my presentation as Donna kindly relocated me from the “big screen” to the table.
I was certainly struck by the power of this. We collectively decided that this was a virtual F2F learning session.
Linking back to the theme of the day and my task with the opening kick off, I could envision a day when virtual F2F learning opportunities are normalized into learning environments. I look forward to learning with these educators as they develop their connecting and collaborating strategies.
~Mark
Resources:
Learn more about the background of the Futures Forum Project.
~ Mark's Musings ~ blog.markwcarbone.ca 