When I first heard Australian French teacher Steve Collis talk about his innovative use of tools such as Utterz, Twitter, Skype and Moodle in a recent OZ/NZ Flashmeeting to engage his students in moblogging and distance learning, I knew I had to find out more.
Steve who has been teaching French and English at Northern Beaches Christian School in Sydney Australia has won many awards for his innovative use of technology to enhance learning.
This year he has taken on the role of Head of Innovation at his school meaning he is in charge of encouraging his colleagues to get involved in different e-learning opportunities and support their students outside of the classroom while upskilling themselves at the same time in creating digital resources.
The following 70 minute interview is a must listen for anyone interested in the above topics as it offers clear and practical advice on how to create exciting new learning opportunities for your students while protecting their identity and keeping them safe online. It may not drastically change your world, but hopefully, it will give you much food for thought. Bon appétit!
Download Interview_with_Stephen_Collis.mp3
Summary
Moodle and Beyond Borders
- Introduction
- taking on role as Head of Innovation to set up grass roots projects across the curriculum
- starting a successful French site in Moodle to allow pupils to collaborate with others around the world
- launching the Beyond Borders project including email forums, text chat facility and wikis with a 5 stage 'collaborate' structure
- seeing the learning benefits of pupils actively interacting with each other in a range of subjects
- encouraging teachers to sign up and facilitating them to take control of their own project
Moblogging
- experimenting with audio moblogging with tools such as Utterz, Gabcast and Gcast after watching a conference talk
- choosing Utterz because of its simplicity and potential for creating multimedia posts from a mobile phone by ringing a local number
- starting the Utterz Wordsworth Reflections project with a Yr 11 English class
- letting students moblog their poetry outside of the classroom inspired by their local environment and cross-posting their creations to Utterz and Wordpress using email or mms
- seeing a positive response from students who found the project highly motivating, liked receiving comments from around the world and enjoyed reflecting outside of the classroom in their own time
- dealing with the financial costs of the local calls
- seeing pupils personally engage with the project after some initial nervousness
- finding more silliness/apathy from Yr 9 Utterz geography project and offering students alternatives
- troubleshooting with Gabcast in Brittany and recording daily updates as mp3 files
- deciding how to moderate audio posts and giving students time to rehearse
- being able to use 17 international numbers from France, Spain etc with Utterz, but only paying the price of a local call
- being able to use any mobile phone or landline with Utterz by using a pin number
- dealing with the 'public' nature of moblogging and training students to think of the 'rules of engagement'
- ideas on setting up an Utterz project, moderation and cross-posting
Internet safety and cyberbullying
- keeping a record of pupil details (mobile numbers, usernames, real names and passwords) in a spreadsheet
- establishing rules for appropriate online behaviour (students never use pseudonyms and never refer to personal information about themselves)
- making internet projects 'transparent' to address the issue of potential inappropriate behaviour or cyberbullying
- being aware of students' 'digital legacies' for future job prospects
- having received parental permission, letting students set up individual Twitter accounts following the established rules of anonymity
- ensuring all participating students swap usernames so they can follow each other and tweet in French
- seeing a reluctance from certain pupils to take part
- being sympathetic to English creeping in from time to time as a scaffold
- seeing a positive reaction from parents
Skype and distance learning
- creating an online course in Moodle based on the textbook and create distance learning opportunities for students
- using Skype conference calls and text chatting for conversation practice in French for one hour per week to support the interactive exercises from Moodle
- using text chat facility in Moodle to create fun instant quizzes in French in class and letting students text chat with each other even if they are neighbours
- the importance of using accents in text chat
- online students v face to face students
- sending home weekly progress reports
- seeing online students accelerate their learning by gaining ownership of it
- managing workload and setting up online courses
- rolling out distance learning opportunities to other students and seeing colleagues volunteering to offer online courses across the curriculum and support less technosavvy staff
- sharing good practice and not forcing colleagues to adopt new technologies
- hiring students to help upload resources on to Moodle site
- assigning responsibilities to different students based on the token economy 'Crackpots'
Voice recognition
- using voice recognition software Dragon Naturally Speaking to reduce the need for typing for planning, creating worksheets and sending emails
- speaking deliberately to ensure almost 100% accuracy
- using a USB headset designed for voice recognition such as the Plantronics DSP 400 to improve effectiveness
- correcting typos by typing by hand
Winning awards
- admitting to being an 'approval junkie'
- becoming Microsoft Innovative Teacher Award 2006 for New South Wales for the Beyond Borders project
- attending a conference in Cambodia and the opportunity to network face to face with 400 other winners from around the world
- winning an in house Teacher of Excellence award 2006
- winning a national Excellence in Teaching award 2007 which included a generous cash prize
- coming no.19 in the 'Teachers who have Drastically Changed the World' award 2008
- a few final thoughts
Show Notes
AustralianEnvironment (Blogger)
AustralianEnvironment (Wordpress)
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