Concetta Gotlieb's blog

Friday Sep 04, 2009

International Collaborative Project Opportunity

I'm walking around Europe and thinking about inviting students along for the ride. Look into classrooms in Spain, ask questions of my family in Italy, take pictures in Israel... more..

Starting to plan for my trip in earnest:

Students could start asking questions now
When I get to Spain I'll be walking and might not have brilliant internet access for a few weeks
After that I'll be in Spain, Morocco and Italy

Here are my ideas for planning a collaborative project: Should we cancel Christmas? or Change one thing in your school to make it a better place.

Either of these ideas would involve students asking me to gather information from a variety of sources in the countries that I am visiting. I'd then feed the ideas back and students make some decisions. It's early days at the moment and I would like to simplify this as much as possible but at the same time retain the idea that the students are very much equal partners in the collaboration.

If you'd like to be involved let me know. We will be using an Edmodo community to share information. Sign up to Edmodo and request the code to become part of Big Space.

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Tags: collaboration edmodo ideas macict travel
Posted at 02:59PM Sep 04, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb | Comments[1]

Friday Jul 31, 2009

Festival of Laptop Learning - Facilitating Conversations

Our requirments

A space for uploading links and resources
A synchronous space for asking and responding to questions within the session
An ongoing asynchronous space for teachers/students
A way to get updates to whichever device you select

Desktop sharing

Bridgit - we are using this as it is installed on all the Connected Classrooms so it is the most readily available and widely tested desktop sharing solution. Known issues include a slight lag, not being able to use with the laptops.

In session collaboration

My Webspiration - we will be using this tool as it allows for synchronous chat, whiteboard and even file sharing. An alternative would be to use Edmodo which is more text based.

Professional sharing and discussions

Me.edu.au - we used this tool because it is easy to communicate across a broad audience, single sign on to share resources and ideas on a variety of topics.
Teachers can also request an email digest by emailing concetta . gotlieb@det...

Student sharing and discussions

Edmodo - we used this tool because it is private for student sharing, it allows sharing of files, links, embedding, etc. Contact me for the simple tag. It also allows participants to get notifications of new content, including RSS.

#DERNSW Active online spaces

Search Twitter or even the hashtag #DERNSW in twitter
DERNSW Forum (students/teachers)
Sydney Region Forums
Other spaces?

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Tags: professionallearning dernsw collaboration laptops
Posted at 03:38PM Jul 31, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb |

Tuesday Apr 21, 2009

Creativity and Innovation

As I start at the Macquarie ICT Innovation Centre next term I thought this holidays was a good time to think about creativity and innovation. So I spent time exploring, watching, listening and thinking about these topics. Today is Creativity and Innovation Day so I thought I would set my self a deadline to synthesis my thoughts and collect my resources.

After reading 30 questions in 30 minutes on How To Save The World I thought it might be a good way to organise my thoughts so far without getting too tangled up in them. It's a pretty long messy list of questions but it's reallly just a reference for me.

Digital Literacy

What's the difference between looking at a digital image and look at a photographic artwork?
What is the value of a newly created artwork vs an artwork selected as part of a mashup?

Learning about teaching

In teaching practice is sharing resources more important than discourse about teaching?
In an ideal workflow how does the sharing of resources between teachers work? How is this passed onto students?
Can teachers learn from other teachers teaching in online learning environments?
How can I really notice what is happening when I'm learning about teaching and learning? How can we change the way we learn in professional communities so that we can notice? (Daniel Goleman: Why aren't we all good samaritans?)
What is my real passion - apart from teaching and learning? What is the process of identifying it? How can I create teaching and learning opportunities so that I all members of the experience are able to dip into their passions? (Ken Robinson, Schools Kill Creativity)
What is the right mix of individual participation, content publishing, open-ended conversation, meetings, projects, access to expertise, relationships, community culltivation and context to build a community of practice amongst teachers? (Nancy White: Spidergram Activity)
Who are the stewards for an online community of practice for teachers? How will we reward this responsibility?
What are some good examples of teaching teachers to communicate and collaborate online? Trusting, communicative communities.
How can the opinions, thoughts and ideas of teachers come fully into the link through online learning communities?

Creativity

Why do I feel like creativity is really shiny and pretty when it actually feels like frustration and futility? Is this how others feel? Is this why people avoid it?
How can we motivate people to stop
How can we be creative failures?
We all learnt about creative teaching techniques are they really more important now or is this a misconception? Are there other things we should be focusing on like processing power. (Creativity Techniques Wiki)
Do meme's inspire the kinds of creativity we want for society? (Creativity Portal: 365 pictures)
Do competitions inspire creativity we want for our society?
Do we need to limit creativity to inspire inspiration? Who decides on the boundaries? (Limit creativity get innovation) How does this tie in with meme's and other social 'events'?
Do these resources really inspire creativity in the classroom or are they the new worksheet? Labuat, Exploratree,

Innovation

Complexity requires a consistent light touch, look too hard and you lose focus? What are the skills? How early do these skills need to be taught?
Do meme's inspire the kinds of innovations we want for society? (Creativity Portal: 365 pictures)
Do competitions inspire the kinds of innovations we want for our society?
Should schools be focused on innovation?

Social learning

Why is it important? Why don't most communities actually reach the point of collective intelligence?
How do we help find the teachers with passions?
Don't reject any offer. Try to make your partner look better. Don't judge. How do create environments where people are more interested than they are interesting? (This is an excellent talk by Randy Nelson at Pixar)
How can we create learning environments that encourage a diversity of people to contribute?
Much of my reading has talked about the necessity for individuals to be fairly self-aware and self confident to be productive in online communities. How do you build this?
Is Ze Frank a learning community? What makes his projects so successful? (ZeFrank)
Have we always 'wasted' time or are we actually 'wasting' more of it using collaborative technology?
What is the difference between a constellation of practice and a community of practice?
How can you encourage the quieter members of the teaching community? What is the impact is we don't? A lopsided system remains?
Is emotional intelligence a key factor in the success of online learning communities? Are most teachers more socially aware than other groups? Eg if you compared them to WOW communities? (Daniel Goleman: Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership)
How do we overcoming the technology barriers such as - difficulties in tagging and using rss and having lots of places to go to do things. If we overcome some of these barriers how do we ensure we still keep the good stuff like the strong communities of people sharing slides, videos etc in the communities that are currently available?

Practical thoughts

www.me.edu.au - Refocus attention on finding teachers who seem to have good offline social intelligence and engagement.
Blogging - start blogging about communication skills, listening watching, responding - take this from the NSW Literacy Curriculum
Focus on the other people in different situations. What are they thinking and feeling at the moment?
Develop holistic communities that deal with issues that are important, have broad relevance, inspire passion, allow individuals to contribute in a variety of ways.
Develop online communities that have diverse leadership.
Have those leaders use all the technology and other resources to populate those communities including: rss, multimedia and content publishing.

Creativity resources

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Tags: social learning macict social networking collaboration creativity innovation
Posted at 09:39PM Apr 21, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb | Comments[1]

Monday Feb 23, 2009

10 minute guide to working collaboratively at MacICT

Just a quick reminder to join and use me.edu.au to help you communicate and connect with colleagues at me.edu.au. By adding as much information to your me.edu.au profile your colleagues at MacICT will be able to keep up-to-date with what everyone is doing. It also serves as a record to help others who are interested in pursuing similiar ideas and as a way of connecting to the wider community of Australian educators. Here is an example of Mitchell Squires me.edu.au professional space.

Firstly to understand how to start to use me.edu.au please complete the following steps:

Watch the me.edu.au overview video
Now add all your MacICT colleagues (tip: search for MacICT and you'll find them)
Adding an RSS feed (this could be a delicious feed for example
Creating your first blog post (remember if you already have a blog simply add this to your me.edu.au profile)

Remember I'm available online anytime to answer your questions. You can also ask questions of your colleagues online or in person :)
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Tags: collaboration me.edu.au
Posted at 09:20PM Feb 23, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb | Comments[1]

Sunday Feb 15, 2009

Putting the pieces of the puzzle together

Image: Teamwork Puzzle By: Luxmart

I'm really interested in how we can work smarter by helping each other out. I think a key way that we can do this is by explaining what we are all about in the short and long term. If I know you're interested in solving a particular problem or learning about a specific topic then I can try to help you achieve your goal.

What is your role in education?

Having both studied and worked as both Primary Educator and Adult Educator. For the past couple of years I have been using Social Networking and Personal Learning Networks to enhance my teaching practice. I work three days at a school for kids with emotional disturbances and intellectual disabilties. I work one day a week for me.edu.au. I think my role in primary education is to encourage students to take advantage of anything (particularly technology) that helps them achieve their potential. I think in adult education/professional development my role is to encourage teachers to document their process and share, I believe in this way we as teachers can become an active participant in shaping the educational lanscape in which we work.

What special skills do you have?

Video editing - I've made instructional videos for my work at me.edu.au both of teachers ICT practice and also how to vids such as this one for me.edu.au.
Networking - from people at Google, to IT Guru's, to other teachers who are blogging, to Aboriginal Non-Profit organisations I have made friends, helped and been helped over my life.
I can find and reuse (good) creative commons content to make videos and other resources.

What kind of problems are you trying to solve?

I'm trying to work out better ways that we can use our limited time to collaborate in productive ways. I think collaboration brings with a significant change in the way we think and plan. Once you start building digital repositries of information you need to start thinking about how you'll reuse this info the next year. You can't just repeat the same lesson plan year after year, it doesn't make sense. The assessment is also different, you need to have an idea of the types of contributions you are expecting but not necessarily the content. I think Sue Wyatt has started something along these lines with Student Friends, it's an opportunity for kids to control the conversation and to build on it year on year.

What help do you need?

I'm trying to find teachers who are blogging about their classroom practice or creating class blogs with their kids. I'm also interested in what people think are the barriers to collaboration both in the classroom and within personal learning networks. If you can contribute to my learning add articles, thoughts or ideas to the comments section of my blog.

Your turn

Let me know who you are and what you need help with and I'll try to send things (or people) your way.

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Tags: teamwork professional development collaboration macict
Posted at 01:28PM Feb 15, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb | Comments[1]

Saturday Nov 22, 2008

Open Education Teaching Ideas

I attended the Open Education 2008 Conference at Macquarie University yesterday. It was great because of the people, everyone was excited about teaching, learning and sharing.

What is openness?

Open education is providing people with an infrastructure to be able to collaborate freely
Open education is sharing teaching resources
Open education is using software in education that has been created by volunteers working collaboratively
For those responsible for organising and paying for things open = cheaper and better quality

Teaching ideas from the conference:

Use Open Office (download free) the next time I get the kids to create a text document.
Use the Smart Copying interactive tool All Right to Copy to explain copyright to the kids. Particularly interesting that you can't enter your work in a competition if you breach copyright. You can also contact them if you have a question about copyright.
Read about and sign the Cape Town Declaration
Share your ideas - on a blog like this one, or in a community space like this one created for the Open Education event, you can add resources, teaching ideas or thoughts.
Play Murder Under The Microscope - an environmental education multiplayer game created by the NSW DET that is available for anyone globally to participate in
Many Aussie institutions have provided resources that you can freely use. For example the National Film Archive or the National Library of Australia, you can even contribute to the NLA's Picture Australia project.
Creative commons licences allow media creators to tell you whether they want you to reuse their material. Support Australian Creative Commons, appropriate CC resources are the backbone of quality multimedia creation.
Use the Open Education Resources website provides lots free to use and sometimes change teaching aides and lesson plans.
Learn more about free and easy to use software by coming along to the 2 day professional development extravaganza at Macquarie uni.
Setting up blogs with students is also a good way for you and your students to understand the power of open software - community, easy of use and engagement.

Great me.edu.au people I met:

Sunday Oct 26, 2008

Christmas Carnival of Learning

I've been inspired by different online festivals such as the Student Blogging Challenge, the Comment Challenge, the Digital Storytelling Carnival and other educational community building activities to use an event to inspire sharing and communication. Christmas is a great time for having fun, sharing and finding cool resources. Let's help each other and our students use Web2.0 tools and our online communities to really connect with each other this Christmas.

You can upload or share your links using your existing blog or you can create a teaching blog here at me.edu.au or a student blog using edublogs. Then add your links to the Christmas Resources community. By adding the Christmas community to your profile you'll be able to see whenever new things are adding just by looking at your profile. You can also tag your Christmas stuff in delicious or Diigo with Christmas and add your feed to your me.edu.au profile.

Activity ideas:

Create a Christmas animation that other students can use or copy from using GoAnimate Post links to any cool animations on your blog or in the Christmas community.
Get students to create a Christmas game in Scratch
Send a school in a different state a Christmas message using email
Get your students to create an end of year video message about what they've learnt this year. Upload it to Blip.tv or Teachertube and share it on your blog or in the Christmas community.
Get your students to create a video to send overseas at Christmas telling them about Australia. Upload it to Blip.tv or Teachertube and share it on your blog or in the Christmas community.
Look at Christmas in other cultures using ...
Participate in a Christmas web-quest
Share songs you like to play at Christmas on your blog or make a playlist to embed in yoru blog
Christmas craft ideas - upload your pictures to Flickr when completed. You can also use flickr.com groups to get ideas. Check out this Christmas Gift Project group.
Helping other people at Christmas time. Improve your vocabularly and give people rice at Christmas by playing this game.
Write a Blog posts for Santa. I might even set up a Santa blog to reply if there is some interest.
Find favourite Christmas foods and recipe videos or post recipes on your blog.
Find blogs or information about other things that are going on in the world at this time of the year.
I'll be adding more to the Christmas community as I find things.

There are lots of other ways of sharing, posting ideas on Twitter, Edublogs or any of the other Educational communities around. Or you can just add a comment on this blog.

Christmas is an awesome time for using technology that helps us communicate with each other let's really make the most of it.

edna.edu.au

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Concetta Gotlieb's blog

Concetta Gotlieb

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