eLearning and Collaborative Inquiry

Yesterday's session on eLearning and Collaborative Inquiry by Rachel Sillen and Dan Bodkin HPCSB did a very effective job of modelling the process for professional development favoured by the Ministry of Education. We responded to the questions used to facilitate CI by posting and responding to the discussion in our LMS. This achieves two important things - educators see first hand what kind of forethought is required to effectively use instructional technology in their teaching and secondly they see how asynchronous discussion can be used to encourage reflection and scaffold learning using the ideas of peers.

During the first session, educators are asked to articulate their 'ideal classroom'. Here's what Mike Redfearn and I came up with; We would have one device per student connected to WiFi (combination of tablets, smartphones, laptops, desktops) to collaborate on documents/ presentations (Google Docs, Prezi) and use Apple TV to present to class. Educators and students would access content from the OERB and LMS as a source of information, but activities would be student-directed (Flipped Classroom) i.e. teacher would facilitate the presentation of lessons by students.

Teachers could use the money available through our association PD fund to apply for release time to undertake the Collaborative Inquiry process. Ideally it would be spread out over a period of 4 half days to allow enough time to reflect on each stage.

I have already started this with a couple of teachers, but it needs to be more formalized and include a larger group. I would love to use the same approach of modelling the process within the LMS so that teachers could become familiar with the tools as well.