CollabLearning.org

Today was a professional development day in our district. Sometimes we meet and train with levels and disciplines mixed, and sometimes we split into level- and discipline-specific groupings. Today was the latter. I was grouped with other secondary science teachers. We spent the morning in curriculum development, led by our wonderful district science director, Linda. In the afternoon, I shared with my fellow science teachers some things I have been learning lately from my PLN.

Ordinarily, I would have organized my thoughts using a Keynote or Prezi presentation and mixed in some video or websites. This time, however, I wanted to give an un-presentation. In my mind, an un-presentation is similar to an unconference in that the details of what get discussed work themselves out, depending on interaction within the group. I thought this would be better for group involvement. Also, I really did not know on which topic(s) I wanted to focus.

Since beginning a PLN on Twitter, I have learned a lot. I have learned more in a few short months on Twitter than I think I ever have before in a similar time period. You might say I am bursting at the seams with information I want to share with others. So, I couldn’t narrow it down to just one or two things to talk about today.

In hopes of narrowing it down, at least a bit, I created a mindmap on http://mind42.com which I called “Presentation Ideas.” You may need to collapse and resize this mindmap to view on this page. Clicking the preceding link will open a larger map in a new window.

Social Bookmarking

The way I created the mindmap was by culling through my Diigo bookmarks (Diigo ID: bmontana), looking for sites to share with my colleagues. I wish I knew of a tool that would automate this process. I didn’t finish getting all my bookmarks in the mindmap, which was ok because I planned on sharing Diigo with them, anyway.

So, I explained the benefits of social bookmarking and encouraged all the teachers to join Diigo. They then followed me on Diigo and could see all my shared bookmarks, including those not in the mindmap. Some found additional online resources, which they bookmarked in Diigo, putting it to immediate use. I look forward to the collaboration that social bookmarking can bring.

Benefits of Social Bookmarking:

• Bookmark and retrieve anywhere you can get online, not just from one computer
• Use tags with each bookmark to facilitate searching your bookmarks
• Categorize bookmarks by creating and posting to lists
• Share bookmarks by posting to groups of which you are a member
• Follow others and access their public bookmarks

Collaborative Learning

I have also learned that students learn better if they are given the opportunity to collaborate with others. To some of my own students, that initially meant simply working in lab groups. They have now come to understand collaborative learning differently through its use in my classroom. I have used student blogs and wikis to foster collaboration and reflection during the learning process. My students’ blogs are private, but they have collaborated in the development of a public “body of knowledge” wiki, hosted at http://wikispaces.com. This wiki will become a kind of “virtual textbook,” representing my students’ understanding of physics concepts.

I highlighted Cathy Laguna’s wiki, Web 2.0 Science Class as a model for making one’s classroom more and more collaborative.

I showed a video by Alan November that is quite interesting…

Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom by Alan November

Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom by Alan November from Brian Mull on Vimeo.

This spawned some good conversation regarding collaborative learning and the use of technology in education. Throwing technology into education for technology’s sake is not good. Thoughtful, purposeful inclusion of technology can be helpful to students.

Twitter

Since Twitter has been my professional development lifeline, I had to also share it with the group. I gave a brief introduction to Twitter and encouraged teachers to start accounts. Many did. I intended to include a weekly post from Shelly Terrell entitled “What Did They Tweet?“, but only got as far as today’s post, What My PLN Means to Me, in her blog, Teacher Reboot Camp. This post was very timely for our discussion.

Tools

Another focus was Web 2.0 apps and other tools. I didn’t spend a lot of time on this but directed teachers to Jane Hart’s site, Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, where many tools are listed and teacher-ranked.

Collaboration & Reflection

Time was given for teachers to browse some of the resources and to brainstorm how they might use one or two of them in their classrooms. They then shared with the large group. All in all, I think my colleagues derived some benefit from our time together. One teacher said her head hurt because of all the things I shared. However, I think one of the best outcomes will be the conversations that we will have.