Saturday, December 8, 2012

A Guide to Facilitating an Interactive Learning Project

I have been creating a lot of student projects that use ThingLink as a tool for learning. I have also received a handful of questions from teachers who are highly interested in facilitating a similiar project of their own, but need help with the management involved.

"With so much active student engagement, how do you manage a project like this?"

To answer that very good question, I used MentorMob to create a playlist to guide the project you see below. The playlist takes you and your students through the step by step process of managing the work flow and collaborative group roles, integrating some free and user friendly web 2.0 tools to facilitate the learning process, building the project and turning it in.

A Guided Playlist to Facilitate the Project

The Final Project

....

Adapt the Playlist to Launch Your Own Project:

If you think a playlist like this will help you facilitate this type of active and engaging student project, you can make a copy of it for your own use, then edit it to fit your project. You will find the option to copy at the top of the page when you are viewing the playlist.

Check out more project
examples on the ThingLink Toolkit

A Playlist: Avatars & Internet Safety

For as long as I can remember I've been using avatars to teach Internet safety. It's a fun and engaging way to teach students the importance of protecting their identities when they are online and a great prelude to using a variety of web 2.0 tools to support the curriculum.

I just collected some of the resources I regularly use and created a MentorMob playlist for teaching students about Avatars and Internet Safety. If you want to use the playlist with your own students, just click the Share Playlist link at the bottom, then copy and paste the embed code into your own page.

Create your own Playlist on MentorMob!

My EduBlogs Nomination & Thank Yous

I am very honored to be nominated for EdTech Blog of 2012!

My blog is an essential part of my workflow and it is my most important tool. I would like to thank some amazing people who have kept me blogging.

Janet Barnstable
Thank you for encouraging me to blog and getting me started with my favorite and most useful tool. You always point me in the right direction and I am so thankful for you, your guidance and our friendship.

Dr. Kevin Anderson
Thank you for leading the way and encouraging me to create and teach others.

Sarah Chilton Rose
Thank you for publishing the first comment on my blog. This has kept my focus on publishing a simple blog for busy teachers and I do try to keep it short and sweet.

Sarah Chilton said...

"So glad you did this. I think it is fun that there is a blog out there where you don't have to sift threw all the important information to get to the FUN STUFF!"

April 6, 2009 4:24 PM

D97 Digital Leaders
Thank you for getting me excited about blogging, creating your own blogs, and giving me a reason to blog in the early days. I had the time of my life teaching and learning with you.

Naomi Harm
Thank you for finding my blog and sharing the collaborative wiki projects in the sidebar on Twitter. Your tweet sent me so many visitors that I started tweeting myself, which opened the door to a whole new way of collaborating, connecting and learning.

GettingSmart.com
Thank you for letting me be a regular guest blogger so I can write a little more sometimes.

My Readers
Thank you for reading my blog, sharing it, trying some of the ideas and making personal connections with me. I really love that part.

How to Vote:Here are the official directions from EduBlogs

To vote for your favorites just click on the link and choose the category you want to vote in, who you want to vote for and then click ‘Vote’.

You can vote in as many categories as you want per day!

Please note only one vote per category per day will be counted per IP address.
This means, if your school uses one IP address, you’ll need to ask students and staff to vote from home, or only one vote will count
The system will accept your vote more than once, but only one will be counted!
Voting is open until 11:59pm EST on Sunday December 9th.

Vote Here!

Edmodo & ThingLink: Extend the Walls of Your Classroom

Edmodo is a free and secure social learning platform for teachers and students to collaborate and connect in the 24/7 classroom. The design and functionality of Edmodo is similar to Facebook, but the focus is on teaching and learning within a protected environment. Students don't even need an email account to sign up.

Teachers and students can extend the learning by posting messages, holding online discussions, picking up work and turning it in. Edmodo supports a variety of multimedia to provide students with flexible learning paths including links, images, video and interactive graphics created with ThingLink.

Perhaps an engaging assignment for students would be to publish an interactive graphic to be explored prior to class. This type of assignment can provide students with background knowledge, front load the learning and level the playing field to prepare students for success in class

The folks at ThingLink have made it very easy to use ThingLink with Edmodo and they've even created some video tutorials to help you learn how.

For more tutorials, Common Core Aligned Lesson Samples and tons of resources for using ThingLink in the classroom, please visit the ThingLink Teacher Toolkit.

An Interactive Tutorial: Google Presentation

Google Presentation is a great tool for helping students construct knowledge about a topic as they create. Here is an interactive tutorial designed to demonstrate how to use some of the handy built in features.

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If you are interested in learning more about the features in Google Docs Presentation, you might want to check out my recent post on GettingSmart.com.

Google Presentation for Collaborative Learning

Link Safe