Last week I became aware of an interesting approach to learning about Ontario communities with grade 3 classes. The idea is to involve people from around the province to submit picture clues about the community they live in. The clues are shared with the students, and student responses are tweeted (posted) back through a class or teacher based Twitter account.
The project takes on another level of connectedness by using a hashtag (Twitter conversation label) to collect all of the tweets on this topic into a searchable stream which can be viewed [ here]. What a GREAT way to bring a personal and connected context to the classroom.
I enjoyed an afternoon walk this weekend to take a few pictures to participate this week. I wonder how many clues it might take the students to guess where I live.
Here are some sample tweets from last week.
This will be a great week in the connected learning world.
~Mark
Last Thursday (April 10, 2014) I had the pleasure of attending the meeting of the London MISA PNC group to serve on a panel discussion with
Joe Sisco of the WECDSB did a nice job hosting the event and moderating the panel discussion. My role on the panel was to share some ideas concerning technology planning.
My response:
I enjoyed the variety of questions the panel addressed. Two conversations really stood out for me. First, some excellent dialog around the notions of professional sharing:
and secondly, examining comfort with change:
In a rather timely fashion, this tweet from Donna Fry was posted just two days later while she was participating as a virtual learner by following the Twitter conversations of Edcamp SWO and Edcamp London which ran on Saturday April 12th. I think the tweet captures the essence of the panel discussions in a nice concise way.
~Mark
Related Resources: sound clips in a local format
Clip 1:
Clip 2:
Clip 3:
I had a chance to chat with Brandon Grasley at the end of the OTRK12 conference following the OSSEMOOC “Getting Connected” session. Somehow we got onto the topic of new social media users adapting to the “fire hose” information flow of services such as Twitter.
You can’t get caught up in reading endless material. One must become comfortable with jumping in and out as time permits. Information can be tailored to your interests by using dashboards such as tweetdeck to follow topics of interest.
I decided to put the “jump in” theory to test, so one morning this week I looked at my twitter dashboard to see what could be noted in just a couple of minutes.
SUCCESS !!!
… an insightful blog post
… a digital citizen/digital literacy tip
… and a PD opportunity
Excellent results for just a couple of minutes of reading I would say. Here are a few ways to “jump in” that work for me.
– breakfast & twitter – I enjoy an interesting read to start the day
– tea & twitter?
– a few minutes between meetings
– lunch break
– waiting in the car to pick up your kids
– standing in lineups
Well, you get the picture. Jump in when you can and leverage on the go connected learning .
~Mark
Ed Camp Waterloo Region, held yesterday – Feb. 22, 2014, was an amazing day for many reasons. First off, a special thank you to organizers for arranging the day and bringing so many passionate educators together. Each of the sessions I attended had deep, meaningful and thought provoking discussion. I appreciated the openness of the educators who attended to share their thinking and insights with confidence.
The day also turned out to be a great example of connected learning. Many thanks to the educators who joined remotely and contributed to the discussion via twitter and text messages.
The day after a successful event like this always begs the question: So what next? I hope each of you will turn “what next?” into “what can I do?” Please consider:
Resources
Check out my Storify of EdCampWR tweets
Read Where to now? by Donna Fry
Join in the free professional connected learning with OSSEMOOC
Keep the learning going.
~Mark
~ Mark's Musings ~ blog.markwcarbone.ca 