Our learning activity for weeks 2 and 3 in OLTD 502 was to immerse ourselves in the ‘firehose’ of information available through the Global Education Conference and Twitter and to start building our own personal learning network. This blog post is a summary of my experiences with this over the past week. My experience started with registering for an account on the Global Education Conference website and familiarizing myself with how to use the site. I found it very easy to find sessions that I was interested in and I was able download Blackboard Collaborate so I could join the live video conferences prior to starting my first session. The first session I attended was the conference opening keynote on Nov. 13th 2017 with Michael Furdyk and Terry Godwalt. There were over 150 people watching the session which was less than I was expecting. Michael Furdyk was broadcasting from Toronto and talked about designing engaging global learning experiences, making education relevant, authentic, and have depth beyond the curriculum and school day. He said that the top skills of 2020 are around complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, working with people and coordinating with others. Terry Godwalt was broadcasting from Alberta and talked about making education global and tools that can be used to help people connect, share ideas, and collaborate. Michael Furdyk started #Decarbonize, which is the world’s largest synthesis of youth research around climate change. Terry Godwalt discussed how they have created a global network of students from all areas of the world who are collaborating to research and present their ideas to the United Nations. This year students focused on the effects of colonization on climate change. The second session I attended was titled Developing Globally Competent Students. It was run by a group of 7 teachers from Millersville, PA, USA who are graduate students in Educational Leadership. There were under 20 people attending this conference including 3 moderators and the presenters shared a slide show using audio but not video. At the start of the conference the moderator explained how we could put a pin on a map to show where we were watching from. The presenters talked about the importance of integrating global education issues like sustainability and racism into classrooms in the United States. Although neither of the sessions I attended were directly related to the subjects I teach, I found the experience of being connected in real time with educators from around the world very interesting. There was a map displayed in each session showing where people were viewing from and there were people from all over the world tuned in. I feel like this is a great source for professional development and I would have liked to attend a session on coding that I found but I was not available to watch it at the scheduled time. There were so many sessions offered that I think anyone could find something of interest to them and learn something that they could use in their classroom. Although I was initially a bit anxious about how this experience would go it turned out to be very easy and eye-opening. In addition to attending a couple sessions at the Global Education Conference I created a Twitter account for my personal learning network in the OLTD program. I have had experience with Twitter prior to this course as I have had a Twitter account since 2013 that I primarily use to make announcements to the basketball team that I coach at Enver Creek. I was aware of all the information available on Twitter as I follow some of my colleges who retweet educational content regularly. The Surrey School District has a hashtag #sd36learn that people use to share information and connect with each other. I started off my OLTD Twitter account by following Randy, CANeLearn, and the other members of Cohort 6, then I searched for and scrolled though the #OLTD hashtag. I quickly discovered that there is a lot of quality information being shared about online learning resources which I am sure will be useful to me in the OLTD program and beyond. Please feel free to comment below. You can follow me on Twitter @JeffOLTD
2 Comments
|
AuthorJeff Brisbois is a Archives
April 2018
Categories |