Week 14: Digital- Design Thinking in the Classroom

For this part of course this week, we had to create a prototype based around a barrier that we have in relation to online learning. This was directly related to the fact that in two weeks, our Post Grad course shifts from contact hours each Wednesday to online learning. So, one of the barriers that I had was that I spend quite a bit of time on the small tasks in my classroom such as, marking books, putting feedback on books, telling children where things belong in a classroom. This prototype that my buddy created, does all these things for me by simply following my instructions. 

Week 13: Digital- Inquiry Learning and Robotics

For digital learning this week, we downloaded a tool on our computer that allowed us to follow and create a coding formula to make a robot move it's arm. We had a to copy the process that was given to us and once we got it working, we could change different formula to make it go faster, slower, higher etc. Here is a snippet of our robot in action last week. 

Week 13: Leadership- Teacher Inquiry into Student Learning

This week we had to select a teacher inquiry model that we liked, from a Google slide presentation of different teacher inquiries models. We chose to explore the model below because it provides an opportunity for children to explore the 'discovery' phase first, before developing wondering questions. The question we had posed was, "Will (ro)bots reduce the need for human teachers?" Here were our thoughts below, based upon the different aspects of the inquiry model we selected.

Ignite:

• Will (ro)bots reduce the need for human teachers?
• We hope to find out that our jobs are safe from (ro)bots in the future, or that we won’t be redundant.

Ask: (guiding questions, record everything you already know…)

• Already a mixture of online and face to face classes- not AI but not in class
• Flipped learning - banks of resources - a robot could be playing videos
• Teacher as facilitators
• Do robots need constant power and wifi? Who would programme it?
• Could a robot be a mentor?
• What would be the robot to student ratio?
• How can robot teachers encourage creative and innovative thinking for students - imitation…
• Would this change accents around the world
• Will children learn empathy qualities?
• A robot teachers assistant would be great!
• More control of emotions

Find: Organising resources: where do you get information? Bibliography?

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-jetsons-get-schooled-robot-teachers-in-the-21st-century-classroom-11797516/

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/976257/?reload=true

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-016-9387-z

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12369-011-0116-9

http://www.livescience.com/5576-robots-replace-teachers.html

In the future, robots will only be used to teach certain skills, such as acquiring a foreign or new language, possibly in playgroups with children or to individual adults. But robot teachers can be cost-effective compared to the expense of paying a human teacher, Meltzoff told LiveScience.

"If we can capture the magic of social interaction and pedagogy, what makes social interaction so effective as a vehicle for learning, we may be able to embody some of those tricks in machines, including computer agents, automatic tutors, and robots," he said.

Week 12: Leadership and Digital- Innovative Learning Spaces and Maker Movement

This week there were six activity stations set up and we had to choose three stations to engage with across the duration of the night's session.

Here is a list below of some of the activities we explored and some associated materials to support these engaging tasks. 

1: Flexible Learning Spaces: This tool provides the opportunity for students to explore classroom environments and then make necessary adaptations etc to a model template. 

 

2: Constructing a Robotic Arm: For this activity station we needed to construct a robot arm in a collaborative group. For me, this provided an opportunity to explore the concept of 'robotics' and for me to engage with different materials. 

Link to the necessary information to construct the arm. 

http://www.instructables.com/id/Pocket-Sized-Robot-Arm-meArm-V04/?ALLSTEPS

3:  Collaborative Slideshow: For this activity, we read numerous readings and different online materials to understand how learners perceive different learning environments and what is important. 

4: Revisit and Reinforce: For this activity, we could choose to go back and explore or do any of the previous activities we had done weeks prior to this week. You could choose to reflections, journal comments, go and back and engage with different tasks like Scratch, Makey-Makey, we ad the chance to explore something that we believed we wanted, too. For me, I didn't choose this activity station. 

5: Embrace change: For this station, you had the opportunity to share your thoughts on this Post Grad course. There were numerous questions you could discuss and one of the biggest ones was thinking about technology and how you can use ICT in your classroom. This video was a very personalised task and a chance for us to reflect on our learning journey. 

6: Create and Deploy: AppInventor and Appy Pie: These two tools provide the opportunity to create a mobile app for your phone. There were detailed instructions provided, these two were very similar in the fact that they are both similar to Scratch Programing, 

 

Week 11: Leadership- Agile and Servant Leadership

Reflection: How could you apply agile leadership to a change initiative? 

Agile learning can be summed up in a simple phrase, 'getting better all the time'. Agile learning is one of the foundations of implementing a successful change initiative. A change initiative is thinking about your own teaching practice, how it could adapted, altered changed, you are thinking about how you can better your teaching for not only yourself, your colleagues, but the children that you teach. An agile leader is constantly looking at bettering themselves as a leader in their own manner. 

Week 10: Digital- Real World and Crowdsourcing

Reflection: How could problem-solving be more real-world based 

This week we did many discussions around real-world learning. How do we create real-world based classrooms?

The video below was an example of how we can be creating classroom environments that allow students to take control of their own learning, through topics and themes that are meaningful and relevant to them. For me personally, we need to be creating classroom environments foster learner agency and self-belief of our own learning, in order for learners to get the most out of their education. Instead of us as teachers deciding on what happens in the classroom, we should be allowing learners to select what they want to learn about.