The New Hub - Virtual Learning Commons

This is the second time I have been lucky enough to design a virtual learning commons (VLC).

The VLC at Chris Akkerman will become the go to place for everything digital in our school. It will be the launching pad for projects, websites, web2.0 tools, tutorials and much more.

http://akkermanlc.weebly.com/

The following ideas are my thinking behind each of the sections/pages:

About Us

This page links people to see what is happening at our school and also to get in touch with us. Anyone can leave comments or email us.

Links

There are two links pages. One has Web 2.0 tools that we are using at our school and the other common websites that our students use. I separated them to help our students see the difference between regular websites and those that are web2.0 tools.  

Projects

I predict this will be the most used part of the site. Each grade will have access to their page that that can edit themselves (when given the permissions) . Each project page will link directly to work that is being done in an inquiry project in the classroom. This will help organizing digital files and allowing students to gain quick access to their work, success criteria and other digital resources. 

Tutorials

This page will have videos that and documents that have been made to help both teachers and students learn new ways of doing things using the technology in our school.  This will hopefully free up time for the teacher and student by providing extra support away from classroom and time. 

Staff

These two pages will be something that we will hopefully experiment with too. The Professional Learning page will serve as a place to list resources and documents that we create and share at PL days. The Staff Meeting page will serve as a memory of staff meetings we have by adding minutes (that could be collaboratively written in Google Drive). Due to some of the sensitive nature of information shared, these pages could be password protected too, especially the Staff Meeting page.

Digital Citizenship in the Learning Commons

This year in our school, we have opened up the world of collaboration and communication to our students. What an exciting time it has been. In 4 short months we have initiated 340+ student Gmail and #GAFE (Google Apps For Education) accounts from grades 3-5. It has been a huge task to get passwords changed, model the log in process and learn how to work in this new collaborative environment. Our students have not used email before at school so we have found this to be a huge learning curve as well.

Being so new and exciting, the introduction to the new student Gmail accounts has been relatively easy. We have found our students (for the most part) are so willing to try it our and experiment with using email. They seem so eager to communicate through email.

This eagerness and willingness to experiment has also brought along a new set of challenges. All of a sudden, some students were feeling a lot 'safer' behind the screen of their computer. With this apparent safety, came a few inappropriate emails that were sent to various students. This lack of sensible choices brought up some excellent opportunities to discuss the appropriate uses for email.

I personally believe some of our students really didn't understand how email works and what the consequences of inappropriate choices might be, for all parties. Through a few hard lessons, and continued discussions, I think we are getting somewhere with learning to use email in a positive way. It really is amazing to see students so excited to communicate with each other in another format.

As a staff we have also begun discussions about the need to including digital citizenship (DC) in our assessment practices. It all projects that happen in our learning commons, aspects of DC will always be woven into the learning and assessment that goes with that learning. We need to teach our students the importance of thinking about our behaviour when working online.

In our learning commons and school we are also promoting being a positive online citizen. After discussing this in our last staff meeting, a colleague, and fellow New Zealander, Richard Wells (@ipadwells on twitter) shared posted some posters that he created and posted on his blog. The post can be found here. He also shares the individual posters here.

The positive wall display in our Learning Commons

An Augmented Cultural Museum

Alberta has a celebration in late September called Alberta Cultural Days. Our school decided we'd use this province-wide celebration to kick off a small celebration of our own to acknowledge the diversity of some of the cultures in our school.

This event would be a great way to use the learning commons. We decided on having a small group of students (partly due to the time factor) who would be interested in being part of this group and would be willing to work on it at lunch times as well as at home too if needed.

I also thought it would be a great way to showcase the power of the mighty Aurasma, an augmented reality app available for free for mobile devices.

The Artifacts

Students would take digital photos of things that are unique to their culture. They would then bring the image files to school or save it to their Google Drive.

The Videos

Using those photos as their inspiration, and by recording with green screen, or just using the photos with voice-over in iMovie, the students created scripts to describe their artifact and why it is important to their culture.

 

The Slow and Steady Editing Process

This was the slowest part of the entire process. If you've ever edited video before you'd know its a slow and arduous task. What I find when editing video the students become so particular about their work. They edit, edit and edit until they have something they're happy with. Through this part project I actually wondered if we were going to actually finish at all. The key to this is support. The next time I use iMovie with students I think I will spend more time on teaching this process so that students don't have to spend so long rerecording voice-over or going back and rerecording actual green screen shots. There are quite a few editing tricks that can help fill 'holes' in video clips.

The Uploading to Aurasma

This was the easy part! And by the way, this is not supposed to be a tutorial. That will come soon...

First, the picture/trigger images were uploaded to the Aurasma Studio server from the share point on our school server. Then I uploaded the video/overlay too. Both of these has similar file names so I could match them up when creating the Aura. Once both the pieces were on the Aurasma server, I then linked them together to create the finished Aura. Once created, the photo that the student took then acts as a trigger for the video that they also made. What an awesome way to showcase student work!

It all comes together in The Virtual Museum

Once all thirty Aura's were completed, we opened the museum for business. We invited half a class at a time through the museum, due to only have 15 available iPads. the museum-goers wore headphones to really focus in on listening to the videos (and some audio was quite low in volume).

It was amazing! Every student who came through our museum was engaged and focused on learning about someone else's culture.

Encouraging Curiosity

One thing we want to do in our learning commons is encourage curiosity. One we have done this is create a curiosity station. This was unbelievable! Students came by to record their thoughts 2 minute after I finished the display.

What do you think it is?

HINT: Remember, we live in Alberta, Canada, where dinosaurs once roamed!

Google Apps Power!

I have been part of our system/district wide GAFE prototype since in began in early 2013. I am still amazed at the power of the that Google Apps for Education has in the classroom. This amazing collaboration tool is revolutionizing the way we teach and learn.

All of a sudden our students are able to collaborate so easily and working on projects with other students in seamless way and never have the frustration of losing their work through files transfers via email or flash drives.

After using Google Drive for a month or so, our students are still learning how to work collaboratively in documents together. We have been working a variety of projects where students are working together in a different documents. Here are some workflows we've begun to explore:

Google Docs - Working in Tables

When you have whole class working in an online Google Doc it can get a little crazy! We have found tables to be way to lessen the confusion. 

This video was blurred to protect the students' identity.

Forms - Collecting information to use or share later

Forms have to one of my favourite Google Tools. What an amazing way to collate information in a clean and user friendly way. We have played with various reasons for using forms with students. Here are a couple of screen shots of the form and the collated info.

Students were to read an article about the June Floods in Calgary and then
respond with their feelings in the form above. 

The results were then displayed to show what other people were feeling.
The ability to hide the name column was good to help give
some students more confidence.

In this form student filled out the form so it was as accurate and personal as possible.

All entries were then shared and students were then groups according to the
Smart they wanted to improve on

Spreadsheets - A different way to collate information.

Spreadsheets are a great to build and collate data from scratch without using forms.

This document was a way for students to check where they were at in a project.
It also made their progress visible to the rest of the group.

Google Drawing - Digital Mapping

This example is not student work but the idea was to be able to use technology to become more familiar with Canada and Alberta. I'm looking forward to using this tool in a collaborative way.

This was the first task we started with. It was also centred
around learning how to use the Google Drawing App.

The Questions on the right were to guide their work,
then they used the tools to draw over the map.

The Beginning of a New Era

A month has past, already!

The Chris Akkerman Learning Commons is underway and we've had a great start!

It has been a amazing moving into a new school and starting something new. My day to day work hasn't changed but the people have. All of a sudden, I have to build new relationships and learn new ways of doing things. I have stop and rethink what the important aspects in a learning commons actually are. I have to make sure we have our priorities in the right place and that all stake holders have input into what will be.

Moving into an alternative program called a Traditional Learning Centre (TLC) was always going to be an exciting challenge for me. The first month has proven that this is going be an extremely exciting year. The teachers and students at Chris Akkerman are so focused on learning. It will be amazing to really focus in on what is good learning.

Chris Akkerman has obviously had strong leadership in technology prior to me being there. The teachers and students are quite comfortable with technology as a learning tool. It will be a great opportunity to help everyone build on what they know now and push the boundaries of learning in positive and exciting ways.

The highlight for our learning commons, in the first month, has been around the implementation of the Google Apps For Education (GAFE). What an amazing medium for learning. The power of collaboration is exciting our entire school. Our grades 3-6 classes are buzzing in excitement and are all beginning to wonder what the possibilities of these amazing tools will be.

This past week, we focused in on what it means to work safely on the Internet. All students in our school worked through some tasks which reviewed Internet safety. We followed up these tasks by brainstorming what they knew, as well as new found knowledge, into a shared Google Doc. The idea was to build on what each other's ideas. It was amazing to watch the ideas develop over a few minutes! The video below shows the information being gathered over around a 5 minute period. It has been blurred to protect our students ID.

Over the next month, we plan to continue setting up this learning space to make it work best in our TLC environment. We are also experimenting and using Green Screen technology in Grades 4 and 5, as well as iPads in Kindergarten and Grade 1. We hope to share those projects in the coming weeks.