Exploring Learning

As the last week of the year fast approaches, I thought I would take five minutes out of my writing to reflect on the progress and achievements of the year. I have found this year to be challenging on many levels and want to focus squarely on the successes - as there have been many - to allow me to see what truly matters as all too easily, we forget the good stuff when the tough stuff gets us down. In terms of teaching, I have successfully designed and implemented my first project-based learning project, which was recognised as excellent in the field and so I was asked to contribute to future course design of PBL projects. I also collaborated and delivered my first Global Project, also recognised as leading in the field . I have continued to explore and understand how technology can enhance teaching and learning in the English classroom and successfully helped implement the 1:1 scheme using Edmodo as a learning portal. I set up and managed learner and class blogs to enable learner...

Recently, as part of my research, I have been exploring Diigo. I want to address the need to be able to organise and curate online research so it is easy to find and use in future learning. The need to curate in the explosion of online information is essential in our digital world. For example, this morning I logged on to my University site to check my workload for this week as well as our conferences, to see what discussions had taken place overnight - my colleagues are all in the US so communication is 12 hours asynchronous for me. Following links from this and from Twitter, less than an hour later I have shared four new sites, taken part in multiple conversations, and bookmarked almost ten sites or articles I want to read for my research for the paper I am writing about software that advances writing. I currently use Pearltrees to curate educational sites that I want to use for teaching and learning, which is explored in more detail in my post ' Pearls of Wisdom '. I ...

"You must leave digital footprints so people know you’re treading among them and part of the community." Vicki Davis, ' Global Education by Design ' The final part of Professional Learning in the Digital Age concerns contribution and how it is our duty to give as much as we take from our Personal Learning Networks (PLN), if not more. We all have something to give, we all have something to share - whether it is anecdote or expertise - and we can all learn from each other. Kristen Swanson advocates multi-layered contribution ranging from Tweeting (or even more basically, Re-Tweeting) to speaking at conferences. I think I can narrow my contributions to:- Tweeting  Blogging Collaborative planning at work Leading or presenting PL sessions at school Speaking at a conference TWEETING Tweeting is easiest - stuff just comes to me and I Tweet and ReTweet what I think might be useful to others. I also Tweet quotes from books I read via my Kindle and links I st...

So far in my 2013 quest to: a) focus my exploration of new tools in the ' Ten Tool Challenge ', combined with, b) my virtual book club experience with  Professional Learning in the Digital Age ', I have, c) not done so well, particularly on a). This month - and I swear I tried to focus - I have played around and am experimenting with: a Bamboo tablet Pearltrees YouTube video editor Flipped Classroom pedagogy and on Friday, took possession of a belated Christmas present to myself -      5. a Google Chromebook So - where to start??? Briefly, in response and compliment to the first focus of 'Curation', from the ' Professional Learning in the Digital Age ' virtual book club, I choose  Pearltrees ... I had never ever heard of this tool - and most often, things come into my radar even fleetingly; I usually will have read something or heard something about a tool when I get around to trying it, but this was completely new. How had I mi...