Professional Learning in a Digital Age

C.21st tools supporting C.21st teachers

The walls of the classroom and home have been expanded by social media, the cloud, wikis, podcasts and video-conferencing. These are the new learning environments; they are local, national and global, and populated by whole communities in addition to families, teachers and friends… We need to harness the transformative potential of digital technology to support new approaches to innovative learning centred around the development of 21st Century Learning skills… Pedagogy must drive innovation in digital education.

Beyond the Classroom (Digital Education Advisory Group, 2012, p. 4)

Good twenty-first century teachers are good twenty-first century learners. Professional Learning in a Digital Age (PLDA) is a four-week blended course that equips teachers and school leaders with the knowledge, skills and tools needed for personalised, professional learning in a digital age. With an emphasis on learning through online participatory cultures (Clinton, et. al. 2006), the course explores the role of communication, critical thinking, collaboration and creativity. The course also examines the role of current technology tools for developing a Personal Learning Network (PLN), including as Google Apps for Education, Google Plus Communities, Twitter and Feedly.

PLDA involves one face-to-face workshop OR Adobe Connect session, with four follow-up weekly online components. The essential skills of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and creativity – sometimes referred to as “The Four Cs” – are reflected amongst the general capabilities, outcomes and syllabus content in the NSW BOSTES K-10 syllabuses for the Australian Curriculum. These skills will be modelled and developed as participants grow their PLN through being involved in online professional communities and actively using tools such as Twitter, Google Plus, Google Drive and the creation and sharing multimodal content with tools like Prezi, Animoto, iMovie and Visible Tweets.

NOTE: when using the web tools in this course, participants are strongly advised to choose Chrome as their browser. There have been noted issues with older versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

How to enrol

Please visit MacICT’s website for information.

Course Deliverables and Outline

PLDA provides a supportive blended learning environment for participants to share ideas as professional members of a broader online community. Throughout the course, participants practise the Four Cs – communication, critical thinking, collaboration and creativity – over a sequence of small, achievable weekly activities (approximately 3-4 hours per week).

Course completion involves:

participation on Twitter, sharing tweets and aggregating ideas from current minds in education;
exploring tools for aggregating news feeds relevant to the individual learner;
communication with colleagues through the PLDA Google Plus community;
collaborative critique of a scholarly reading through threaded comments in Google Docs;
ongoing multimodal responses to key weekly questions (through short video snippets, images, tweets and community posts); and
contributing to the co-creation of a multimodal digital mashup through uploading required materials to the shared Google Drive folder.

While there is an emphasis on teacher professional learning, many skills gained in PLDA are readily transferable to the classroom. On course completion, teachers will be able to:

facilitate small-group, whole-class and inter-class collaboration with the online tools explored;
foster the development of students’ critical literacy through the aggregation of online information sources (relevant in areas like research projects, wide reading and online media);
understand and apply multimodality in teaching the new syllabuses; and
be able to mentor the development of rich media projects in the classroom.

To find out more about the full course including upcoming dates please go to: www.macict.edu.au/professional-learning/plda

The Mini Online Course (MOC) component of the course is run through this website.

The MOC takes place over four weeks, with a range of weekly activities and deliverables that are described below. Participants are free to work on these activities and deliverables at times that suit them; however, it is expected that approximately three hours of professional learning will be covered each week.

Week 1 – Communicating
Participants form meaningful and purposeful connections with colleagues both in the course and in the wider online community of education professionals. Key questions on the nature of participatory cultures, the Australian Curriculum and use of current tools prompt the sharing of ideas, with opportunities to contribute to the planning of the multimodal mashup. A shared Google Drive folder facilitates the sharing of digital artefacts that tell the story of each participant’s involvement in the course. Course content introduces participants to the concept of participatory cultures and looks at the development of the Personal Learning Network as a way to get started.

Week 2 – Critical Thinking
Participants engage in a collaborative critique a scholarly reading through threaded discussions in a shared Google Doc, exploring the development of twenty-first century skills in creativity fluency from the 21st Century Fluency Project. In response to the reading, participants will create a class logo that represents either their teaching philosophy, class culture or curriculum area. They share their logos and ideas about creativity with the Google+ community.

Week 3 – Collaborating
Participants learn about managing collaborative projects in virtual spaces, utilising shared documents, folders and community pages to further pool ideas for the multimodal mashup project in Week 4. Course content focuses on both small- and large-scale online collaborative projects and the importance of encouraging students to work collaboratively in both real and virtual spaces.

Week 4 – Creativity
Participants finalise the sharing of digital artefacts for the multimodal mashup project; each participant is required to create their own version of the mash-up. Course content explores ways of scaffolding the processes through which co-creation occurs and is managed to ensure the representation of all learners’ ideas. Video tutorials tailored specifically for the course will provide first-time users with assistance in video editing and publishing.

Rationale

The twenty-first century presents new opportunities for teachers and school leaders with the increasing connected affordances of free and cheap technology tools now commonplace throughout most schools. In particular, the proliferation of mobile apps and Web 2.0 tools enables access to both information sources and people across traditional geo-political divides. For example, leaders can use tools for content aggregation and social media to access a wide range of information sources from industry, education and other experts, and to form people-to-people connections outside of traditional school- and system-based networks. Increasingly recognised as the “Personal Learning Network,” or PLN (Couros, 2010; Richardson & Mancabelli, 2011; Warlick, 2009), educators are now able to use technology tools construct and manage very personalised online networks of information and people that are relevant to their professional learning needs.

The implementation of the Australian Curriculum provides schools with an opportunity to do things differently. It represents ICTs as both broader cross-curricular skills and as specialised subject skills and content knowledge. Rather than simply retrofitting the new curriculum to existing practice, the implementation of the new curriculum is a chance to re-examine what we are currently doing and then re-imagine what learning could look like through a deeper understanding of the transformative potential of ICTs to enhance learning outcomes. In order to re-imagine learning, we need to invest in our own professional learning as teachers, equipping ourselves with the knowledge, skills and tools needed to learn in the twenty-first century.

The new question by contrast is, with a strong teacher-learner partnership, how could technology be used to deepen and accelerate learning? (Fullan, 2013, p. 25).

PLDA will draw on the participatory culture skills of collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creating to support course participants in identifying effective pedagogies that allow the employment of modern digital technologies to support learning.

Pedagogical Model for Course Delivery

“Global connectivity, smart machines, and new media are just some of the drivers reshaping how we think about work, what constitutes work, and the skills we will need to be productive contributors in the future” (Davies, Fidler, & Gorbis, 2011, p.1). Underpinning the style of delivery of the course is an understanding of participatory culture, which includes opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship (Clinton, et. al, 2006).

This MOC is different to many online courses. It does not consist of a body of content that needs to be remembered. Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake and may be different for each person, depending on your interests, teaching philosophies and influences. One of the core goals of this MOC is the development of learning experiences that are situated somewhere between that of a “traditional” online course and a vibrant learning community. We hope to nurture learning conversations within a number of different environments – through the use of social networks, collaborative tools, shared hashtags, documents and folders, and in personally ‘owned’ spaces. PLDA incorporates connectivism in a similar way to many current Connectivist MOOCs (or ‘cMOOCs).

The design of this MOC, is based closely on that of the #etmooc and incorporates three important principles for effective online courses. First, the the MOC component of PLDA is developed with a weak ‘centre’. While the Course Page will provide an overview of core content and weekly deliverables, the majority of interactions occur within online groups and networks, facilitated through the use of the specific tools explored: Google Plus Communities, Google Drive, Twitter, Creative Commons and Feedly. Second, participants are strongly encouraged to develop their own reflective, learning spaces. Although not specifically addressed in the course, blogs provide an important platform for promoting teacher reflection and sharing. Participants who are active educational bloggers are welcome to share links to their work. Finally, online sharing and participation are essential for the success of all learners in this course. Participants are encouraged to share knowledge, support and encourage others and to participate in meaningful conversations.

There will be four modes of learning available:

Face-to Face – Participants may attend the face-to-face workshop
Online Resources – Video tutorials specifically prepared for this course are available in advance. These resources will be placed on the MOC website with links to relevant content emailed out at the beginning of each week. Course instructors monitor and guide participants throughout the course, checking in and offering further assistance as needed.
Self-directed Learning – participants are free to examine all course content and concentrate on areas that address individual learning needs.
Ongoing Reflection – Participants are strongly encouraged to to reflect on what they have learned. This may involve Tweeting key ideas or related links, participating in online discussions on the MOC Google Plus Community page, blogging sharing resources with other online tools.

Throughout the course, the Four Cs – communicating, critical thinking, collaborating and creating – underpin the face-to-face and online participation. The course aims to empower participants to become active members of the online community of education professionals. In this context, participants can be effective change agents within their schools and wider community, communicating ideas in diverse online communities of professional educators, thinking critically about the future, collaborating with colleagues and creating changes needed.

Navigation