Social Learning

A quote that Dean shared with us during the very first class caught my eye and I have related to it all semester.

Learning…
Social and Connected
Personal and Self-directed
Shared and Transparent
Rich in Content and Diversity

It really sums it all up!  All four of these statements relates to my experiences with social learning this semester! Technology bridges the understanding of our peers in our class. This class was not just a regular class I have been enrolled in before. Where you come in, sit down, listen to your instructor and then by the end of the semester get to know a couple of good friends. I am leaving this semester with some great knowledge about who we are and what some of our indepth beliefs are. This could not have happened it we never shared through blogs, elluminating sessions, and final projects together.

Social and Connected

• I am learning with my peers who are all at different levels. At times I feel that my colleges are a step ahead of me and at others times I was a step ahead of them depending what the context was. Many of my peers guided me, supported me, and shared with me their responses to the topic I was talking about. In return I provided the same support, guidance and comments the best that I could. For example, Allanah was reading my postings and shared with me her voicethread guide and one by pmguhlin. This enhanced and sped up my ability to get my voicethreads complete for her students and my wiki. She also informed me that I need to ask for permission to post pmguhlin’s PDF file on my blog. I really have to pay attention to what I am using and making sure that I share with validity. I would not have known that this was an issue if she never brought it to my attention. I received positive reinforcements from a bunch of my peers but in this case Cori was encouraged me that I will love voicethreads and if I have any problems to let her know. It is nice to have friends who are one step ahead of you.
• I also had a great conversation with Chelsea and Kayla on the video, Vision of Students Today that Chelsea posted on her blog.  After watching the video and reading Chelsea’s post I grabbed the video and posted my own thoughts on my blog. Chelsea also shared a video of that her class made with the same idea but using their own creativity. This really shows the creativity that can be brought forth in the classroom.
• With the help of Google Reader I was kept organized with everyones blogs which has helped us inspire and motivate each other.
• Charlee and I did a lot of learning through our cellphones this year. On the weekends I am not at home, so if she was having trouble embedding or figuring out a tool, she texted me. Other parents at the rink would laugh at the whole procedure. I found it a bit harder to explain something when I was not quite sure the exact link names to click on with no computer in front of me. Sometimes the cell service was not very great and I would be walking around in search of cyberspace connection holding my phone in the air.. everyone would get a laugh on my behalf..

Personal and Self-Direct

In order to create an environment for social learning you need to be personal and self-directed.

• One comment that Dean sent out, I believe to Larrisa was to not be sorry for speaking your mind. I learned that it is ok to share your thoughts and not to worry about judgements. I took some time over the crash course to voice some of my opinions. For example Deans podcast posting  gave me the opportunity to talk about how I feel about intrinsic motivation. My belief that we need to take ownership of our own learning. How can teachers create a classroom full of students to be motivated.
• My Slide roll I created with my sketches– I wanted to share my feelings of frustration with the world. Get support or reactions of yes I feel the same way..

Learning is Shared and Transparent

• I shared my excitement with others and step-by-step intructions about out to embed, skype, or create voicethreads. As Dean said, “Collaboration is the new cheating”. Why reinvent the wheel. I also took many instructions, ideas and reflected on the thoughts that others shared.

Rich in Content and Diversity

• One of Allanah’s students shared pictures and information from his trip to Germany with his class while he was away on holidays.
• Topics we share and get going. I shared a great conversation with Chelsea and Kayla about Vision of Students Today. Larrisa’s feeling about marriage and wanting hope for her future. Tammy’s frustrations when she needed breakfast and the store had no milk.
• The elluminating classes were rich in content and diversity. All the guest speakers had so much to share with us that can enhance our teaching abilities. For example, the use of photos in math. Cut your pizza in quarters before you eat it, take a picture, and then use it to explain to the class in a real life situation how to do fractions.  

What is a blog? “It is all about the idea” I received this comment in my blog from Terry and it sums up the whole social learning idea. “Thanks for sharing these tips. That is what blogging is about. Sharing your learning with others. All of those in your personal learning network will appreciate your sharing. Why should we all have to figure everything out on our own when we can so easily learn from each other”

Social networking with others on the web not only builds friendships but enhances learning. There are many more social learning experiences I could share with you but Dean wanted to finish reading everything by the end of the weekend. Thank you everyone who participated with me in my learning this semester. Have a great summer!!

Final Project Reflection

Well I put my finishing touches on the home page today for our final project. I made a voicethread about living a gluten-free diet with my daughter. I used the mic instead of the built in mic and it never made much of a difference in the sound quality. I can not wait to see the video that Charlee created too! As I said in one of my last blogs I found that knowing so many tools and widgets enriched our wiki page and took a lot less time to figure out how to work all of those tools because we had learned to do so earlier. This ended up being a great way to check my understanding. What have I remembered and what have I forgotten??

Charlee and I have collaborated on definitions and recipes. I hope that we can continue to add to this wiki together in the future. I would love to add more pictures and videos of us making recipes to personalize our wiki even more. We had talked about how nice it would be to add some pictures of gluten-free products available in the stores we marked on our google map we created. Charlee found a bunch of places that I had never heard of yet. She gave me the list and I am going to check them out. If the places are reliable then we will post them onto the google map too.   

When I downloaded my voicethread I clicked on the manage wiki link and put in a few tabs for a page. Hope this helps get some more views on our wiki. I am far more postive in getting the work published and seen on the web than I ever used to be. Excited too to say the least! Thanks to all our peers who filled out the spreedsheet that Charlee sent out to you! It was amazing to see how so many of you are involved with the gluten-free life in some way!

Thanks Dean for allowing us to choose a topic relevant to our lives today. This final project became personalized for me! Check out where we are at on our wiki. I would definitely take this same class again in the future to enhance what I know today to what is new in the future. For example, if I was to make another wiki for a final project, I could add in new things that are out there, building from the foundation that I have started with this semester. Therefore, taking it a step further…

I got Published!!

 

I forgot to tell you all that I got published! You can find me on Allanah’s blog! She put on an introduction from all three of us who were mentoring with her, a video recording of one question a student had for me when I skyped with her class, and my voicethread I sent to her students. I just checked my voicethread account and they all commented!! I was rather touched during this experience. Check it out, Winter Voicethread. It really is exciting to create something for others to see and learn from! It makes the work feel much more valuable!

Mentorship Journey

 

I have had 3 wonderful mentors who gave me guidance and enriched my learning! I have learned the importance of social networking with others around the world. This experience has opened my eyes to what is possible in the classroom with no walls. The web tools offered such as skype not only builds friendships, but enhances learning.  Here is a wrap up of my journey…

1. Allanah King is From New Zealand and has a group of grade 2 students. I started out by commenting on her blog and saving many of her ideas and teaching tools she uses with her students. Reading blogs from other teachers enriches our students learning by bringing in a variety of the teaching instructions available out their into our own classroom.  For example Allanah posted a website my Story Maker. Using this website students can show their creativity and create a story. The website helps you write the story for you as you add setting and characters and develop the plot. You can print off your work. Skyping was the next learning curve for me with Allanah. I went from being nervous and awkward to excited to set up my sister and share conversations this way with my nephew. Also what a great way to communicate with my children if I am ever away! I loved getting to know more about New Zealand with her studests and sharing information about Canada in return.  Being able to see the students while asking questions and their facial expressions when I answered them was priceless! Alannah had asked if I would do a voicethread. Gulp… I had never done one yet and with all the time crunching assignments to keep up too I thought that I may not get it done. She sent me an awesome package that helps guide you through the process one step at a time. I ended up completing not only one picture but a four picture voicethread. Voicethread is a great way to send information, ideas, thoughts, creativity, expressions, etc anywhere whether it is for educational purposes for to students to learn from others around the world or expressing what we feel about something.

2. Kimberly Brown is from Regina and I had the opportunity to comment on her students blogs. She has Friday writing every week. I enjoyed reading blogs from students who were from this area. I could really connnect with them. Her class has read Mary Harelkins book about the Tunnels of Moose Jaw adventures (Tunnels of Time) and went through the Al Capone– Chicago Connections Tour in Moose Jaw. I have also read the books and taken the tour. Also this year her class is going to Circle Square Ranch and we just went there with my daughters year-end field trip. I could ask so many more questions or add comments about my own experiences too. Blogging is time consuming. It always took a long time to download into each students posts and to download my comments. Last night I went through all the students posts and commented on each one so that I ended the term with at least posting on one of their writings! I enjoyed reading and commenting with the grade 6/7’s!

One student commented on her experience with skyping with others students in Nevada. The classes asked each other questions about where they live. This changes the whole perspective about how students can showcase their learning and sharing with others. For example, creating a poster about another province in Canada. How much more enriching would it be to use voicethread and have someone from Alberta talk about what thier emblem stands for. There are so many tools available to showcase work in meaningful ways. 

3. Valerie Becker is from West Tisbury. She has a group of grade 7 students who were working on a project called “School’s Out”. This paper has written articles from the grade 7’s about Martha’s Vineyard. The paper is distributed (14,000 copies) for free but make money on the advertisements. This money goes towards a trip to England when the students are in grade 8. What a wonderful opportunity! Valerie was my first skype friend. She was the one that caught me at night time. I edited quite a few articles for the students. I was amazed at the quality of writing and work put into their articles. I learned more about what you could do with google docs in reagards to formatting students work. You can stike out areas and hightlight what you changed and it all saves automatically so if your computer has a bad day and maybe shuts down, you do not lose any of your editing. Anybody could post work and have collaboration from many people. This helps get ideas about how we can improve our work or spark interest about the work you are doing. I got to be a fly on the wall while they were putting together their paper. Valerie was busy going around helping all the students while some of the grade 7’s were explaining and showing me what they were doing. When I had to go and skype with Allanahs class some of them would say just wait one more question! It was awesome! I can not wait to see the written paper. I believe that we are getting one mailed to us!

I learned more about time changes. Valerie sent me a website that depicts the different times around the world. I have been learning the vastness of opportunities that mentorship has to offer the students in our classroom. I am hoping to be able to keep in touch with Allanah, Valerie, and Kimberly and their students and when I become a teacher we will be able to share these experiences with our students too!

Thank you Dean for starting the Universal Social Networking life for us. We have met people we can stay in touch with from around the world. How do we increase the growth of this social networking in the future?

Well I am off to go shopping! I am going to send a little something across the world from Canada!

Voicethread

Today I am making a voicethread for one of my mentors class. Allanah and her students from New Zealand asked me questions through skype one afternoon and we talked a bit about the weather here in Canada.. lots about the snow and snow storms we get. I also found a video on a blizzard in Saskatchewan and will send that along with a voicethread of a fort that we made in the winter. This will be a great insight to the students who never have snow in their weather forecast. I found this video on youtube to send to them. I wish that I had my own video to share.

We also talked about hockey. New Zealand plays dryland hockey only, no ice hockey. Therefore I have taken 2 videos over the weekend to add to the package I created; one is the introduction of players in the Calder Cup games in Winnipeg and the other one is  Brandon taking a shift during one of his games at the Subway Tournament also while we were in Winnpeg this weekend. 

I am going to share with you the steps I went through while making my voicethread and all the wonderful helpful links that Allanah sent to me as a guide.

Here goes….

1. I used two step by step guides that Allanah sent me. I am trying to figure out a way to share them with you. They are a PDF file and I can not download documents on this post and the widget box.net is not working for me yet. If anyone knows what I can do to download a PDF, please let me know.

I got it to work.. I used the box.net widget that is available… Click on the links below to have a step by step instructions for voicethread. Thank you Allanah, it was very helpful!

mguhlin_voicehread_tutorial

Voicethread_Blenheim.pdf

2. I start at 8:45 and it took me until now to finish up.  I still have to send Allanah the package I created for her. I find that it is the embedding, linking and sending that takes up a huge chunk of the time. The voicethread took little time consumption. 

3. I followed the steps, signed up, added a photo to my profile, uploaded my slideshow, added voice and it was done.. Very simple. It takes longer to download photos than it does to record the voice. I also have found that embedding and trying to get all the information on my blog is what takes time as well. I am trying to find a way to share all that I did and how I did it.  

4. My voicethread account has space for 3 voicethreads, 75MB of storage, and 30min of Webcam time. Once I have exceeded this amount I will have to pay for more space.

5. You can upload slideshows or individual photos. So if you have more than one photo to share it is nice to be able to do so this on a slideshow. When you add your voice you can use a mic or a webcam and mic. I have a built in mic on my computer. I am not sure if the sound quality would have been better if I would have plugged in a mic. I will experiment with that in the future.

 Here is my Winter voicethread I created for New Zealand! I could not get it to embed. I wonder if it does not have voicethread features to embed this program. I can recall this blog can not embed the google docs spreadsheets either.

Wanted “Karie Shiels”

I started up the search engines again this morning but this time it was in search for my own identity. I could not wait in class when we were talking about how we are being portrayed to the world so peeked then. I never found to much but I never dug into it either. So here goes, lets find my identity..

Ok first off I am going to talk about something really funny. When I was reading Chelsea H’s blog she talked about how she was not found on google and was more than happy about that. I commented on hers and told her that when I peeked in during class that my name popped up on others blogs but my own did not show up. I told her it would that be funny if hers was on there but she did not show up when she googled herself. Well Chelsea, you came up on my identity search…  How weird is that?

There were four pages of “Karie Shiels” I also show up on twitter, facebook, ECMP 355, Dean’s ideas and thought blog, Chelsea H’s blog along with a few other of peers, one of my mentors blogs, and diigo…

I will remain wanted for making supper, taxi driving, clothes folding, and most of all hugs and kisses…

What is out there? Who is out there? Can anyone help us?

Today I started up my the search engine, buckled up my seatbelt, and put google into drive. Dean mentioned to Charlee and I at our last elluminating class to read other blogs and get some chat going with others who are more knowledgeable about Living a Gluten Free Life. I started by searching Gluten-free blogs. I did not know what I was in for but all I could say was wow. There is so much out there and so many blogs relating to this specific personal experience whether for celiac, gluten-sensitivity, etc.
I started by searching the first two sites to a get an idea about what the weather was going to be like for travellin. The first one was was called Karina’s Kitchen and the other one was called Gluten-Free.

The sun is shining and this is what the beginning of my journey was like
Karina’s Kitchen has many tried tested and true recipes. I have printed off one in hopes to find all the ingredients and try.  She has a twitter account where she shares tidbits from her life often in the kitchen. I am going to follow her on twitter and see what valuable insights she has to share. This is going to be a great way to start using twitter some more. Who know it may help me choose this tool more in the future. Karina also has almost 400 comments on her blog. She asks everyone to share their blog url with her. This opens up the possibilites for me to learn and share with so many people about this health issue by looking at all the blogs sent to her site. I sent a comment with our Wiki hoping that she will be willing to join the journey that Charlee and I have started.

I am glad that Dean mentioned to us to check “what” and ”who” is out there. E-mailing, blogging, and connecting with people sharing the same interests is a great way to interact and learn more. I have added these blogs into our wiki…

A Vision of Students Today

I am reading blogs tonight and I found this great video called A Vision of Students Today. I decided to take a break and share my thoughts. I found this video while reading Chelsea H’s blog and it really touches me as a present student and a future teacher of tomorrow. It is important that we take the proper measures when teaching the children of our future. It is a scary concept when we do not know what the future holds… but why are we not facing what is happening to our learning of today?… since that is the key to our future! How do we foster students ability to take ownership of their own learning? If students are on facebook, playing games on their computer, etc. does that not mean that we need to make a change in the way we catch the attention of the learner.

I will share a story about my experience with English. English was never my strength in school. I never failed the subject but I did much better in the maths and sciences. When I returned back to the school at the University as a mature student, English 100 was too much for me and I had to take it in the spring in order to concentrate my whole time on the subject. Fortunately this helped me learn some tools. There were less students in the class making the one-on-one time more possible. A couple of semesters later I knew that taking a second level math class would have been much easier for me to do and we are always told to pursue our strengths rather than our weaknesses, but not me. I believed that if I am going to be a teacher I really need to focus on my English, an important subject in schools, so I enrolled in an English 110 class. Many students were doing what you see in this video— skipping class, using the computers for facebook and other media tools that had no reference to the class itself, or others just stared at the ceiling waiting for the time to pass by. I got back my first assignment and it was not the best. I think it was a 70? I wanted to improve on this and all the feedback I received was usually “it could be stronger”. That was not helpful. It never matter how much I tried to change it, it was hopeless because I never knew how to make it better. I have a best friend who amazes me in her English ability so I asked her to read it and give me her opinion. She gave me one tip and my marks changed from that 70’s to mid 80’s just over one little adjustment to improve my writing! I got a letter in the mail encouraging me to consider a major or honour program in English for my degree. This boosted my confidence to continue learning more about how to write essays…

So my question is how can we get students in all these subject areas to want to take learning into their own hands. Is technology one way to start?

Thank you for sharing that video Chelsea!

Where I am today with my 3 mentors…

What I need to accomplish with my mentors this week!! I am loving this experience! If I ever travel to these areas I am going to know people there! How cool is that!!

Valerie– Edit more articles and skype to interact with the students

Allanah– 1. Send a voicethread to her blog. 2. Send a package with some information maybe through video to visually answer many of her students questions asked today. Does anybody have any cool tech ideas to send the information??

Kimberly– Blog and comment on all Fridays writings

Skyping TAKE 4 TAKE 5

Take 4… Skyping is getting to be a lot less awkward for me. I spent some time visiting with Valerie’s grades 7’s today. I was a fly on the wall and students cycled through talking to me. Their video cam was working so I got to see her class in action. They told me all about what they were doing with their “School’s Out” paper that they are now in the process of creating. I spent time last week and this week helping edit many articles that will be written in the paper. Valerie has sent out a couple of papers from last year to Joni. So I hope that they come soon and I get the chance to read it. Here is a photo that I snapped during the skype. 

The advertisement was showed to me through the webcam so is hard to see but I thought it was a cool feature. I lost the more clear ones. Well I may not have lost them but I have not been able to find them yet. If anyone knows where the photos are stored in skype, please share!!

Take 5….. I also skyped with Allanah’s class all the way from New Zealand! Yah, this was really cool. I got to talk to the future since it was Wednesday at 9:10am and only Tuesday at 3:10pm here… She has a great bunch of students who asked me questions about where we live, Canada. I am going to send some sort of package via internet to show the class a bit more about me, my family and Canada.  Allanah would like me to send her class a picture with a voicethread… So this is where I will start. Voicethread here I come!!! I thought this day would never come… lol

There were some questions about snow, snow storms, and weather so I think I may send a picture and talk about a snow storm we travelled in. Of course I have to send a photo of our hockey family and tell them all about how much we love the sport and all play. They play dryland hockey on the grass in New Zealand, no ice hockey!!

I can see myself keeping in touch with my mentors in the future!! What a great way to connect with others and learn about the world!!