Designing engaging and rigorous learning experiences

Yesterday I led an online workshop for Toddle at the Inquiry Educators Summit (TIES).  It was amazing, even though there was a Zoom outage in the UK and eastern USA during the time of my presentation.  Thanks to the amazing support in India, I was still able to deliver my presentation - and it was really odd because I could not see either my slides or the audience.  Although my intention is to provide a fuller account of this workshop, including a downloadable resource that Toddle can add to their Learning Library, I'm going to give a few brief reflections here.  First of all here were the intentions of the workshop:

• Learn how to incorporate higher order thinking skills into student learning experiences and assessments
• Consider how to get students to think and dive deep into their inquiries
• Understand the importance of giving students voice, choice and ownership in how they show their understanding

I'm always amazed at the wonderful notes that participants take using sketches.  It's a really creative way of taking notes and I'd like to share a couple that were made during my presentation and then shared on Twitter.  Obviously Sketchnotes done live over an hour's presentation cannot cover everything, but for me looking at these later it was interesting to see the main points that were seen as important during my session.  This first one is from Lucy Elliott, a PYP Coordinator in China.

Looking at this one I can see the message that comes up clearly is that teachers are the designers of learning.  I can see references to Bloom's taxonomy and the importance of designing so that students are using higher level thinking skills.  In particular that creating involves new and original work/thinking.  I can also see the reference to the SAMR model.  Again I see lots of verbs being used to provoke higher level thinking and reference to the importance of asking open-ended questions.

This one is from Shailja Datt, a PYP Coordinator in India.  This also mentions Bloom's and the SAMR models, and the verbs that can raise thinking.  This one also includes the other "R"s that I feel are important:  rigour, redefining the task and return on learning.

I'm very grateful to both these that were shared on Twitter as it helps me to reflect on my presentation.  I hope to receive the chat (which I also couldn't see) later and at that point I will write a blog post to answer any outstanding questions.

Developing 21st Century Skills through Multimedia

Last week I had a long meeting with our R&D Coordinator, Scot Hoffman, as we are putting together a Multimedia Project Guide and Planner for Teachers.  Although we initially started talking about Bloom's Taxonomy and how our aim is to help teachers plan multimedia projects that will facilitate higher level thinking in students, we quickly moved away from that and started to talk about the 21st century skills identified by ASB as being critical for our students' futures.  These are:

• creativity and innovation
• critical thinking
• information fluency
• collaboration
• communication
• managing complexity
• multicultural literacy

At the same time we wanted to incorporate the work that Bernajean Porter has been doing with our teachers and students about rigor and craftsmanship.  As teachers work through the planner we want them to consider the learning goals so that students make meaning before they make media.  We want teachers to consider the type of communication that will be most effective for students having a desired impact on their audience.  We then want teachers to consider jointly with students the mode of communication that allows the chosen media to best work together and tools that they can use to create their product.  All of this has to happen before production and publishing.

As we were dissatisfied with using a graphic of Bloom's Taxonomy when we feel we have already moved way beyond this, I have started to create a new graphic that will combine our 21st century skills with the process we want students to go through when creating multimedia.  I'm posting this graphic below and would love feedback from anyone who is also trying to help teachers plan for developing both the multimedia craftsmanship skills and 21st century skills in students.

Photo Credit: Moritz Petersen via Compfight cc

Media Fluency and Digital Citizenship

Every year at ASB we have an author come and visit us at school.  Next year our librarian has managed to persuade Frank W. Baker to make a trip to Mumbai to teach our students about media literacy.  In the latest edition of Learning & Leading with Technology, Frank Baker writes about the importance of being able to analyze media and create media products.

Students often enjoy looking at art and being able to understand the different techniques an artist has used.  In our media lessons with Grade 2 this year we introduced students to the wonderful website from the National Gallery of Art Kidzone where students were able to create many original pieces of digital art and then add them into Animoto to make their own art movies.  However visual literacy goes a step further - since students are being constantly bombarded with images it is important that they understand how to "read" the information that is being communicated visually so that they understand that images can be manipulated.  In the past I have taught lessons using fake websites such as the Tree Octopus or Dog Island and students were initially fooled into thinking these were genuine websites because they contain images.  As Baker writes many students "don't have the visual literacy skills they need to be critical viewers and competent communicators in a digital world."

In our Grade 4 students study and eventually also make their own advertisements.  We develop this further in Grade 5 as students put on a trade fair and need to advertise the products or services that they are selling.  The adverts the students create can be posters or videos, and next year I'd like to have them also try to make radio scripts too using different sound effects.

At the same time that we teach media lessons, it's important to continually reinforce the necessity of being responsible digital citizens.  Students understand the need to write using their own words, but many teachers and students need to be constantly reminded that many online images and sound are also copyrighted and they need to be responsible in locating media that is labelled for reuse - and then citing where this media came from.

Photo Credit: (davide) via Compfight cc