Sheri's notes for the final presentation to be delivered in Elluminate's ClassLive synchronous collaboration environment.
Tonight is the final for Developing Digital Learning Environments.
But perhaps the true title ought to be called Social Learning. Social Learning is why we create digital environments for education. So that students can learn together in a connectivist style.
Social Learning has several components: Teacher, students, content, tools.
Its about the creation, development and maintaining of community. In a school, there needs to be administrative support, technology support, content support, parental support and more. This course provided much of the scaffolding for the faculty.
Focusing on students. I
In fact, online learning is about relationships -- relationship of student to student; student to faculty; student to content; facilitated by tools.
A course needs to be alive and engaging.
For the eLearning Project, I focused on Unit 4: Social Groups & Formal Organization. Last term, we were required to create multimedia. Unit 3 has several multi media chunks that I created in addition to content that I found. But this term I wanted to focus on the creation of a professional learning community among my students and on helping them actively participate in social learning.
I created assignments that have the students interacting regularly. and are tools they can use outside of the class.
Discussion (using Thinkfinity -- provided by Verizon freely to the education community)
Blog (using the blog tool within weebly)
Voice Thread (using free version)
Google Docs
SOCIAL LEARNING & COMMUNITY
Blog -- because individual processing and sorting through of material is a necessity in the learning process. Having small groups participate by reading and commenting on each other helps to be individual relationships.
Voice Thread -- in small group. similar to the blog -- requires individual processing of material but all participants are on the "same page." But does this bring about a conformity in their ideas? Hmmm fits right into our sociological conversation about GroupThink.
Discussion & Google Docs -- entire class... to create a large community
Discussion allows for one to one student interaction. One student writes, one student responds.
Google docs is a very different experience. It is a true many to many environment; where the final product is a melding and compromise of individual contributions. Some cool tools are built into Google. Students can enhance the shared collaboration through Google +'s hangout to share and work together.
