Funny thing is, that in preparation for these workshops, we are encouraged to reach out to our participants, do a pre-workshop survey and set up a collaboration space. Lots of my workshop leader (WSL) colleagues use Edmodo for this purpose and while I like the overall feel of it’s set up and the capacity to have assignments, quizzes and polls and other social networking feeds, I am very committed to my development of shells for student portfolio’s and work using Google Sites. Perhaps more experimentation is required as the graphic user interface is much more interactive to a student potentially than a Google Site and more opportunities to see the student learning in their social network framework familiarity creep into the formal context of the classroom setting. While I have not fully bought in and therefore have not started to think about discussions or resources of value, I did come across an interesting thread that I follow from Mr. Meehan asking about resources and ideas of linking La Amistad (which I teach) and a mock trial. As our Mock Trial team prepare for nationals at school, I am thinking our Unit of Inquiry on this topic in Year 3 MYP would be a cool way of getting engagement for this highly successful club. Like my Twitter feed, there are nuggets of golden ideas that a teacher can take and run with if you are following the right people. It also helps to see what other colleagues in the building are doing as we articulate our written curriculum in compliance with MYP Programme Standards and Practices and try to make those interdisciplinary subject links. I imagine Edmodo would be a little more structured than our current (perhaps overuse) of Google Docs and perhaps the first step is to get with the teachers and the students that have successfully used this medium as both a teacher and a learner to better visualize it’s use in the classroom and evaluate if it is worth my transition from Google Sites.
Point in fact - the slideshow below is part of my developmental work with International Baccalaureate (IB) in a teacher professional development workshop in the Middle Years Programme (MYP) that explains the ideas behind the 16 Key Concepts which we build Units of Inquiry through. The photographs are my own – so no worries about copyright infringements here! This is the joy of Google Docs – not only do I have my students already collaborating on slide shows, they keep their digital notebooks on their sites so that they no longer have a hard copy notebook – it is all online with digital links to places where they have gotten their information from. The best part – in the ever flattening classroom, I can be sitting, late at night on the 15th floor of the Minneapolis Hilton, grading the papers that they completed in class on Friday from my screencast and tasks set on their class Google Site and give them formative feedback – and I’m not even in the state! One student told me it was like I was “Big Brother” – oh yes…and I am watching!