I hope you’ve all been following the K12 Online Conference this year. There have been some fabulous presentations coming out of this year’s event and, as usual, there has been a diverse collection of topics and ideas with something for everyone. You can check out the entire conference at k12online.ning.com
I had the privilege of being able to contribute to the conference again this year with a presentation called Ways of Working. I must admit that it deviated a bit from my original submission idea, which was to create a movie that followed the processes used by three different students as they responded to a task from their teacher. I was planning on looking how each of the three students used the web and social technologies to take a slightly different approach to dealing with the set task.
As so often happens, the intention of what I wanted to do was quickly drowned out by the time and resources I actually had to make it happen, so the presentation morphed into what you see above. It’s not exactly what I’d planned, but I’m still pretty happy with it… it still looks at most of the things I wanted to include, but just not in the way I’d originally envisioned.
It was an interested experience to hang all this stuff off a single focus point, in this case, the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition that takes place in Sydney each October/November. I particularly liked the idea of using SxS as the core for the presentation because I know of quite a few schools that do actually use it as the basis for a thematic unit of work for their students so I know that it really does have a “real world” use in education. I was also quite fascinated with the way that social media and web technologies have infiltrated and expanded the event over the last few years, and I think it offers a great example of how the web and the real world can collide in a good way. I also liked the notion that the use of technology in schools can (and should!) be used to support real live physical events, and that technology really can be used to enrich a real world experience. And finally, because K12 Online is such an international event, I wanted to take the opportunity to showcase a little bit of Sydney, this beautiful city in which I feel so lucky to live.
Hope you enjoy the presentation, and that you take the time to check out the other 79 or so presentations that have been part of the conference this year.
Ways of Working by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Loved the presentation Chris as it shows easy ways teachers can expand the use of technology with students in classrooms. Have pasted the presentation into my blog to show year 5/6 teachers early next year.
Hi Betchaboy,
I´m so glad I came across your blog and this presentation via twitter because it´s pitched right at my level of knowledge. I´m already familiar with some of the media you suggest in the video and with using Netvibes for example where I have collected quite a few blogfeeds and I was just trying to get my head around putting RSS feeds of blog comments on it, as well, when you´ve opened my eyes to the possibilities of using the tabs for collecting info on one specific item or event. Truly useful for private and classroom use. I´ll be looking into some of the media that aren´t familiar to me yet, as well.
Right, I´m off to have a look at your flikr photos.
Have a good New Year´s Down Under. I was in Sydney 15 years ago and still promote it as one of the best places on the planet.
Have a good one, Guido.