Ways of Working

[Chris Betcher]

This presentation aims to explore a range of ideas that teachers could use to make a real-world task richer and more meaningful for their students. Using a large public art event as the focus, it looks at a number of ideas for enriching student learning with technology that could be modified and applied to nearly any context.

Focus Questions

• Are there events and activities in your local area that would lend themselves to such an approach? What are they? How would you apply these ideas to those events?
• Are these ideas and techniques only useful for large events such as SxS? What other sorts of classroom activities could these ideas be applied to?
• How could you use live RSS feeds more effectively in your classroom activities? How could your students use RSS to hep them learn more effectively?
• Can you provide other examples from your own teaching practice that show how technology was used in an embedded way to support the sort of learning you were trying to create? What do you see as the advantages? The pitfalls?

A little bit of backstory on this presentation
I must admit that it deviated a bit from my original submission idea, which was to create a movie that followed the processes used by three different students as they responded to a task from their teacher. I was planning on looking how each of the three students used the web and social technologies to take a slightly different approach to dealing with the set task.

As so often happens, the intention of what I wanted to do was quickly drowned out by the time and resources I actually had to make it happen, so the presentation morphed into what you see above. It’s not exactly what I’d planned, but I’m still pretty happy with it… it still looks at most of the things I wanted to include, but just not in the way I’d originally envisioned.

It was an interested experience to hang all this stuff off a single focus point, in this case, the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition that takes place in Sydney each October/November. I particularly liked the idea of using SxS as the core for the presentation because I know of quite a few schools that do actually use it as the basis for a thematic unit of work for their students so I know that it really does have a “real world” use in education. I was also quite fascinated with the way that social media and web technologies have infiltrated and expanded the event over the last few years, and I think it offers a great example of how the web and the real world can collide in a good way. I also liked the notion that the use of technology in schools can (and should!) be used to support real live physical events, and that technology really can be used to enrich a real world experience. And finally, because K12 Online is such an international event, I wanted to the opportunity to showcase a bit of Sydney, this beautiful city in which I feel so lucky to live.

There is a page of links, some "making of" trivia, and a bunch of other stuff on the wiki at betchablog.wikispaces.com/waysofworking

By the way, presentations like this are quite a lot of work to make... and the thing that makes all that work worthwhile is the comments, questions, feedback and even criticisms of those who watch it. Your comments are appreciated... no, expected! :-)

[Karen Burns]

Thanks so much for adding all of the links to the wiki. I will be passing on your ideas (with links and credit) to my staff as the year goes on and I have already sent a link to the presentation to the art teacher, photography teacher, field ecology teacher and others who take field trips. I sent out some info to the PE teachers, too. I want to come see the art in person someday now, too!

[Telannia Norfar]

This was a very informative presentation. I liked the idea of your original vision. Maybe you can do it next year. It was so great to see all of the different ways you can integrate technology for a field trip. I think you don't have to go on a full field trip but just a trip outside.

[Chris Betcher]

Thanks Telannia,

I actually think a lot of it, especially the use of feeds and RSS, is applicable to almost any class based activity, whether it's a field trip or just a regular class task. A student doing work on Stem Cell research could just as easily tap into the world of news, blogs and twitter to see what sorts of things people were saying on the topic. Although those thoughts and opinions from the blogosphere might not be directly relevant or usable in their research I could almost guarantee that by browsing through those online conversations they would be led to other resources that almost certainly would be useful.

I think you could apply this sort of thinking to ANY topic.

Chris