LIBE 477: Final Vision Project Blog #3

My Learning Journey and Final Vision Project

Throughout my journey in LIBE 477, I have learned more than I could have imagined.  It began with rethinking what a 21st Century classroom looks like due to reading the Why School ebook:

• Shift from content mastery to learning mastery
• Rethinking assessment (less about regurgitation of information, more about critical thinking)
• Focus on discovering rather than delivering the curriculum
• Learning with our students (demonstrating what learning looks like)
• Learning from each other and experts
• Less paper and pencil tasks and more creating and publishing for others

...all of which help develop the following: 

Next, came my learning from my chosen topic for the Reading Review - how digital technologies can promote collaboration:

• Justification for using digital tech:

• And how this benefits teachers and student learning: 

Lastly, through several inquiry projects, I learned that I can take ownership for my own development of ICT skills and pedagogy and help other teachers by sharing what I’ve learned. Not only that, by connecting with other teachers in this course, I’ve gained invaluable knowledge and now have a personal learning network (PLN) of people I can turn to for learning and with whom I can share my learning.  As the dynamics of teaching change to better adapt to this change in “easily accessible information” through technology, what better way to learn and “keep up” than by learning from one another?  By being open-minded, adaptable, and having a life-long learner mindset, we as teachers and teacher-librarians can help our students develop the necessary 21st century learner skills that will help them be successful in the future.

All of this learning led me to create my final vision project - a project that will, with its use, enhance 21st century learning skills in teachers and students, will promote collaboration amongst students and staff, and will encourage sharing of information and knowledge.  

Since technology (Chromebooks) and the focus on G-Suites for Education have been a huge focus and investment in my school district, I wanted to focus on developing opportunities for my colleagues to learn how to use the G-Suites in the classroom. 

As educators, we have the opportunity to attend many professional development sessions on a plethora of topics.  The problem is, how can we do it all? With our busy lives, it's difficult to find the time to do it all and have time to implement all we've learned. Personally, I’ve been to several workshops to help me learn the G-Suites, but often come out of them overwhelmed and with not enough practice to truly develop my skills.  I have found with time, much practice and help from my “techy” husband and colleagues, I have slowly built up my comfort and skill level with their use...of course, I am always learning!  As teachers have a wide range of comfort with technology and the use of G-Suites, many choose not to use them or use them for more basic applications such as word processing.  But there is so much more learning potential in their use!  This is why I have created a PADLET (collaborative digital bulletin board) which contains a curated list of links and videos that can help staff and students learn how to use Google Docs, Slides and Classroom to help promote collaboration.

This is a partial image of what my Padlet looks like.  Click on the image to gain access to the Padlet!

The learning in this course led me to the creation of this project, but the actual realities of putting this Padlet together was a learning journey in itself.  Once I figured out my focus for this project, I needed to determine how I would share the knowledge of using G-Suites to promote collaboration.  At first, I thought I’d step out of my comfort zone and record videos of myself showing the different ways to use the G-Suites.  This took a lot of exploration and trial and error.  I finally found that using the Screencast-O-Matic extension on my Chromebook and uploading the videos into a YouTube video were the best ways to share my videos.  

With the timing of the creation of this project and the global pandemic (COVID 19) happening at the same time and thus, many schools delivering curriculum online, I discovered a great Facebook group: Teachers Using Google Suite For Education.

This led me to looking at and finding so many fantastic videos and blogs that teachers have already created.  I also realized, why should I only include how to use G-Suites as a collaborative tool?  As many teachers have varying comfort and skills levels with G-Suites, I decided to include the basics of using Docs, Slides and Classroom.  So now, I have a collection of several curated videos that I found online (and thought would be helpful), plus a few that I created myself using screencasting (four to be precise: Peer Editing on Docs, How to Work on Google Slides Presentations with Multiple Group Members, Using Google Classroom as a Blog, Providing Teacher Feedback on Google Classroom).  This was an interesting experience in itself too!  I had to re-record myself several times before I felt my videos were “good enough” to publish.  It is a strange experience hearing yourself on a YouTube video!

Next, was trying to decide how to share all of these videos...Blog? Website? Slides presentation?  I finally decided on using the Padlet platform for several reasons: 

• I can easily share it with others with a link - this can be emailed, put on a library website, or shared in a blog such as this one.
• I like that I could organize all of the links in columns according to the topic: The “Why”, Docs, Slides, and Classroom. I even decided to add a few extras (shortcuts for marking on Doc and using Padlet as a collaborative tool), because, why not? So depending on the teacher's needs, finding a link with a quick tutorial on the tool that he/she wants to use/learn about, is simple and an efficient use of time.
• This is a collaborative tool - others can share their knowledge and/or findings by posting on the digital bulletin board themselves. 

Even though there were several times I wanted to throw my computer out the window due to severe “lag” issues (I’m sure because so many people were online due to this COVID issue), oftentimes wondering whether this would come together in the way I envisioned, I am quite happy with how this turned out!  I look forward to sharing it with you and my colleagues. Once we get back to school, I’d like to share the link to this blog and the link to the Padlet and walk through it with my staff during a staff meeting or PLC. 

During this time of uncertainty, and the prospect of entering schools any time soon is unlikely, I will share this with my staff in an email in the hope that it may help them navigate some of these tools as a means of delivering somewhat of a curriculum to their students.  Overall, my hope is that:

• teachers, teacher-librarians (and students) will find this a helpful tool in their own ICT skill development; one in which they can come back to whenever they need guidance from short video clips and practice
• teachers will use this to help promote collaboration (and thus 21st Century learning) in the classroom, not only between students, but between teacher-and-students (through feedback for instance)
• teacher-librarians will use this to collaborate with other teachers in developing their ICT skills
• teachers will use some of these videos to share with their students how to use aspects of the G-Suites
• teachers will add to this Padlet to share other tools and/or strategies they’ve discovered in using digital tools to promote collaboration

For myself, I plan on “practicing what I preach” by ensuring I use these tools in my classroom to help my students develop the skills and  feel success with collaborating.  As I find new tools and/or strategies, I will continue to post them on the bulletin board.  And who knows, there may be more videos coming from me and perhaps even some using the webcam feature.  It was actually quite fun! 

As with much of the learning that occurs, I couldn’t have done it without the learning from my PLN through this course, our helpful and inspiring instructor, and the plethora of resources that so many people take the time to “put out there”:

Works cited link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YXAFmv3tC-9eAnc17-5FpvvVNLHJvBPXCD4ODVEOTR0/edit?usp=sharing