Today, they Year 9s at NIST did a great job running a service fair to raise funds for the Children of the Forest with loads of events to engage other students. Coincidentally though, after volunteering to have dirty, wet sponges thrown at my head for a half hour fundraising event, I came across this article/infographic about the success of online fundraising versus traditional offline fundraising. It really makes me wonder if we couldn't be taking some new approaches to our service projects at school. Click the infographic for full size and let me know if you have any ideas or experience with Social Fundraising.
Thursday 19 May 2011
...Time to Sit Back and Let Technology Do All The Fundraising?...
Today, they Year 9s at NIST did a great job running a service fair to raise funds for the Children of the Forest with loads of events to engage other students. Coincidentally though, after volunteering to have dirty, wet sponges thrown at my head for a half hour fundraising event, I came across this article/infographic about the success of online fundraising versus traditional offline fundraising. It really makes me wonder if we couldn't be taking some new approaches to our service projects at school. Click the infographic for full size and let me know if you have any ideas or experience with Social Fundraising.
Thursday 5 May 2011
...CoETaIL Course 1 - UbD Final Unit Plan...
As required for CoETaIL credit, I have had to submit a teaching/learning unit which incorporates the use of technology in the classroom as part of the students' assessment. The main theme of this Year 9 unit is Personal Empowerment which gets students to consider the decisions they make and how they can affect future situations and decisions that they will be presented with. The idea seems fairly simple but to get the students to seriously consider decisions and their impact on their lives takes a fair bit of self reflection on the part of the students.
To help demonstrate their understanding of this, I decided to have them conceive of a 'choose-your-own-adventure' style storyline that challenges someone to make difficult decisions that will lead to another decision (e.g. "You're invited to a party but you have a championship basketball game the next morning. What do you do?"). This would work well as an interactive video but currently our school's only video editing software is the abysmal Windows Movie Maker (future post to come) which, as many of you reading may know, is far from reliable. Instead, I've asked students to make an animation using Flash. This builds on skills students will have learned in years leading up to Year 9 as well as expanding their skills by adding some simple action scripting (primarily through the use of buttons). As Year 9 technology students at NIST follow the MYP Curriculum, this project follows through the Design Cycle including Investigating, Designing, Planning, Creating and finally Evaluating.
Below, you can find the UbD Unit Plan for this unit (sometimes it doesn't seem to load on the first viewing of the site but a quick refresh seems to work).
As Course 1 comes to a close, it's a good time to reflect on the course and what I have learned. As a technology teacher and self-proclaimed nerd, my awareness of many of the Web 2.0 tools that we were exposed to was probably much higher than most and there were few technical aspects that I found to be particularly challenging in Course 1. While my awareness of these tools was reasonably high, my adoption and willingness to experiment with them has progressed quite far between the start and the end of Course 1. Outside of the classroom, I moved from a 2 year old Nokia E71 smartphone and dove into the world of Android with a Samsung Galaxy Cooper (also known as the Galaxy Ace). This has definitely changed the way I interact with the web and I'm still learning to find the right balance between my online self and my real world self. As for in the classroom, just an hour ago, I ran a reasonably successful QR Code Scavenger Hunt around the school campus with my Year 7s so if this CoETaIL course has done anything for me, it has forced me to read, understand and, more importantly, try new things in my teaching.
As far as the organization of the course, I think that Course 1 was a bit of a teething session and that by the time we start Course 2 in September, the expectations of the work and requirements will seem more clear and I'll be able to just get on with things at a more steady rate. Overall, I'm happy to be a part of this course and looking forward to continuing to challenge and be challenged with regards to technology in education.
To help demonstrate their understanding of this, I decided to have them conceive of a 'choose-your-own-adventure' style storyline that challenges someone to make difficult decisions that will lead to another decision (e.g. "You're invited to a party but you have a championship basketball game the next morning. What do you do?"). This would work well as an interactive video but currently our school's only video editing software is the abysmal Windows Movie Maker (future post to come) which, as many of you reading may know, is far from reliable. Instead, I've asked students to make an animation using Flash. This builds on skills students will have learned in years leading up to Year 9 as well as expanding their skills by adding some simple action scripting (primarily through the use of buttons). As Year 9 technology students at NIST follow the MYP Curriculum, this project follows through the Design Cycle including Investigating, Designing, Planning, Creating and finally Evaluating.
Below, you can find the UbD Unit Plan for this unit (sometimes it doesn't seem to load on the first viewing of the site but a quick refresh seems to work).
As Course 1 comes to a close, it's a good time to reflect on the course and what I have learned. As a technology teacher and self-proclaimed nerd, my awareness of many of the Web 2.0 tools that we were exposed to was probably much higher than most and there were few technical aspects that I found to be particularly challenging in Course 1. While my awareness of these tools was reasonably high, my adoption and willingness to experiment with them has progressed quite far between the start and the end of Course 1. Outside of the classroom, I moved from a 2 year old Nokia E71 smartphone and dove into the world of Android with a Samsung Galaxy Cooper (also known as the Galaxy Ace). This has definitely changed the way I interact with the web and I'm still learning to find the right balance between my online self and my real world self. As for in the classroom, just an hour ago, I ran a reasonably successful QR Code Scavenger Hunt around the school campus with my Year 7s so if this CoETaIL course has done anything for me, it has forced me to read, understand and, more importantly, try new things in my teaching.
As far as the organization of the course, I think that Course 1 was a bit of a teething session and that by the time we start Course 2 in September, the expectations of the work and requirements will seem more clear and I'll be able to just get on with things at a more steady rate. Overall, I'm happy to be a part of this course and looking forward to continuing to challenge and be challenged with regards to technology in education.
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