Facilitating Collaboration - Session Five

Well, to be honest, I haven't been giving class my full attention these past few weeks (hence the tardiness of this post). No excuses though! I loved creating the Ning for my science department (thanks Terry for the idea...) In general, I'm all about being organized - my students swear I have OCD and having things up and running before using them on the job is my usual procedure. But, with the creation of the wiki for my students in forensic science and other (new) topics I'm covering in my classroom, it really feels liberating to say to my students that we'll be tackling some of the material together and that it's new for me too. That's not to say that I can jump into a classroom unprepared, but I no longer feel guilty (not sure if that's the best word) when something doesn't go as I planned or something unforseen pops up. I have been confronted by the students that are out there to push buttons and will ask questions until they trip up the teacher to "prove" how little we know, but I've always been able to handle them with some finesse. It's just that when I've planned a lesson, activity or lab and I haven't anticipated all of the angles, my usual internal response is frustration that I didn't have it perfect. With really focusing on collaboration these past weeks, I've learned to let a little bit of that go and have been able to bring in some activities without hours of preparation and pre-planning attempting to find all of the stumbling blocks ahead of time.
So this week, I've been just working through the immediate task at hand and I've set up my sci dept wiki, invited the other teachers to it, but have yet to see any collaboration. I've run into the same issue with setting up a blog for my staff development team here at school. I started small with both endeavors - for staff development I only invited 3 members and my sci department consists of just 4 others. Everyone is so busy that they really don't want to take the time to learn something new, even if it will benefit them immensely in the near future. (Although I just realized that we have a sci dept meeting today and I may have a captive audience...)

Facilitating Collaboration - Session Four

For the class this week, we're to start a wiki or Ning and I have half a mind to use one that I just created for my Forensic Science final exam. My class has no textbooks and so I often copy off various print sources for my students and provide additional online resources through the class Moodle. When starting this class, I decided to play around with the idea of having the students create the class text in a wiki (Ning is blocked at our school) as their final exam. I set up the wiki and created pages that would be like the chapters in a book. Next, I added members (I created user names and passwords for the students that contained no identifying information in case the wiki is ever made public) and checked to be sure that all students had access. Finally, I assigned students to groups and pages that they would be editing together. During our final exam periods the students created content following a rubric we had put together the previous day. I gave them three days to edit and in the process, students created a few new pages and re-organized the groups while working in etherpad to be sure that each student was contributing. Creating this wiki (I've opened it up to a protected status so that you can see what we're up to) was our trial and error session that I will use to plan out and create a new wiki for facilitating collaboration. I'm hoping to include the podcast I'm working on. I've scripted out an explanation of one of the anatomy labs we do to study the effects of muscle fatigue.

Facilitating Collaboration - Session Three

So this week we worked on RSS feeds, setting up a photo sharing site and thinking about Nings in education. How can they be applied to my school or job? Well, first of all I have to recruit some individuals willing to go out on a limb so to speak and get out of their comfort zones. For example? I started a blog for my teacher development group - we're looking to implement a portfolio component to the high school curriculum - and I invited the three other members of my team (start small, right?) and there has been no action (as you can see here). I'll I've heard back that it was too confusing and hard. It was too much to take in just to keep information accessible. UHHHGGGG!(I feel like Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the ball away at the last second...)
Soooooo, I must first find a few individuals willing to be daring - OK, open-minded at least - that will succumb to my exploits of engaging their brains. The RSS feeds are easy - I already envision my students blogging (when the sites are unblogged - I mean unblocked)and subscribing to their feeds so that I don't have to search out their individual blogs to find updates (I was wondering how Louie has managed that all of this time.) I also see using feeds when I find cool blogs that I want to follow, like the science ones I found last week. I've also played with the RSS reader account provided by Google and have created a shared page with interesting blogs I follow.
Photo sharing is also an easy incorporation for me. I've been taking photos during my classes and labs - not of the students, but of the labs and activities themselves. I plan to post these as slide shows and use them in video clips (like those we made in Animoto). I want to post them in various places - my school web pages, our Moodle, the Wiki etc. This would make them viewable by those in the class and on the outside - I hope to help parents answer the question "So what did you do in school today?" Now, understand that there wouldn't be updates by day, but an overview of topics and activities.
Finally, I would love to use Ning in our school, but the site is blocked as social networking and I'm having a bit of a time getting our tech crew to adjust and tweak the filters so that the district is maintaining their policies while opening up restrictions in some areas. So I started a wiki in wikispaces (I'd link you to the home page, but it's private right now to "protect" the students) instead.