Siyavula is involved in a project to create workbooks for Grades 4 – 6 in Natural Sciences and Technology, that will be printed for all schools for free, in 2013. This is in partnership with Sasol Inzalo and interested primary school educators that volunteer their time.
But we need your help!
Please join us in this collaboration! This is a fantastic opportunity for educators to have a say in the workbooks they will be using in 2013. If you know any other educators from your school or other schools who may be interested, please forward this on, on our behalf.
Over the course of three weekends, educators will unpack CAPS, and really get to grips with the new curriculum. They will be creating the workbooks – a great opportunity for professional development.
Where and when?
We will be hosted by St John’s College, Johannesburg.
If educators are not based in Johannesburg, we will be sponsoring some lucky educators from other provinces to join us for these weekends!
Workshop 1: afternoon / evening of Friday 2 – Sunday 4 March 2012
Workshop 2: afternoon / evening of Friday 23 – Sunday 25 March 2012
Workshop 3: afternoon / evening of Friday 4 – Sunday 6 May 2012
We request that educators be there for the whole of workshop 1, and then the Friday sessions of workshop 2 and 3.
Siyavula’s focus area has always been Grade 10 – 12 Maths and Physical Science. But we are very much aware that in order to produce a Science literate South Africa, one has to lay a strong foundation on which to build scientific concepts, laws and principles – starting in the earlier grades. Siyavula may have excellent FET Science and Maths textbooks, but we know that starting at FET is too late for many learners…
Siyavula News
Siyavula has some exciting news! Our openly licensed Grade 10 – 12 Maths and Physical Science textbooks have been printed by the Department of Basic Education, for free distribution across South Africa! This means that every single learner in a government school that is taking Maths and / or Physical Science in Grades 10 – 12 will receive a copy of our textbooks, paid for by the Department of Basic Education. This is hugely exciting for us as an organisation, but also for the world of open educational resources – as far as we know, this is a world first. The books have their own website and can be viewed at Everything Maths and Everything Science!
Please don’t hesitate to contact me for further information!
Kind regards
Bridget Nash
Community Coordinator
021 469 4771
“Back-channeling” is were the magic of using twitter in the classroom really kicks in. It refers to establishing a hashtag for your classroom/event/conference and actively promoting it to be used actively in real time by participants during, but even before and after the event to stimulate discussion and feedback. Wikpedia refers to it as “ the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside live spoken remarks.”
Backchanneling can be used to achieve different goals within varied contexts (classroom, events, conferences). You will not necessarily have the same objectives when using it in a classroom to when you use it for an event or conference. It must be made clear that a backchannel can evolve with or without our intervention. For instance, if event participants, on twitter, start talking about an event of their own accord. We can however, pro-actively facilitate the backchannel process and when we do this in a classroom context, we can bring in some measure of control to see to it that educational objectives are reached. For this reason I will deal with backchannels in the context of a classroom separately to when we use it at an event or conference which we will look at in Day 15. In the controlled context of a classroom we will set up a backchannel as a managed environment and use it as one of the tools to make learning happen in a visible and to some extend measurable way. Let us see how we can attempt to do just that.
Step 1: Setting it up (practically)
Students can, strictly speaking, follow the backchannel discussion on their mobile phones, but I have found that having a visible twitter screen alongside your presentation screen REALLY encourages interaction and discussion. This practically means that you need to have 2 data projectors set up with 2 screens. Only advantaged schools can afford this, so more often than not it means that you will switch between your presentation and the twitter screen, leaving the students to engage with you using twitter on their mobile devices or laptops. The ideal is to have 2 screens where the teacher presents the topic (see screen on right) while the participants or students discuss what is being said and comment (screen on left).
When your twitter screen is not visible all the time, you need to create regular intervals to show the discussion screen. You can use questions time to swap back to the twitter screen and your presentation screen.
Step 2: Create and share the hashtag with your students
Next you need to create a hashtag to focus all the discussions around the classroom topic (see how to in day 7). For classrooms I suggest that you do this at the beginning of the school year and maintain the momentum throughout the year. Make sure that the students have the hashtag in advance so that they can start preparing for your classes (what should we bring; what is the lesson going to be about; pre-questions; pre-instructions).
Step 3: Choosing the display tools
As you would like everybody in the room to be able to read the backchannel discussions, you will need to enlarge the normal twitter hashtag stream. There are a few good 3rd party tools that you can use to show off your backchannel optimally. These tools will show tweets as it happens (in real time) and you do not have to refresh it regularly as it should ideally auto refresh. Tweetchat (see previous image) is a good backchanneling tool which allows you to…
Set the refresh speed (how quickly it loads new tweets)
Pause the stream (if you want to focus on a specific tweet e.g a question or answer) and
Block certain undesirable individual’s tweets.
A few other backchanneling display tools to use…
Wiffiti (http://wiffiti.com/screens/85882/) randomly displays tweets and is a good display to use during breaks and before the class start. It also have a realtime timeline display choice. As you can see, you can even embed the display in your class blog (or wherever).
Visibletweets creates bright colourful tweet pages that can be displayed as tag clouds (handy to see who are participating as well as the main words) or rotating tweet windows. See our tweet cloud for the last few days…
For more backchannel tools, check my database for an ever growing list of tools.
Step 4: Backchannel “control” (some ideas)
It is a good idea to appoint a backchannel moderator to help you manage the twitter class stream during a lesson. Appoint, on a rotation basis, a student to keep an eye out for questions and bring your attention to when students go “off topic”. Even if questions do not come up, schedule discussion breaks regularly where you bring the twitter backchannel into play, and show the stream. For low tech classes, you can let the students write down their tweets on a piece of paper and have a student per group enter the tweets using a cellphone or laptop.
Step 5: Structure
If we want to use a tool like twitter we need to be clear about how we want to incorporate it into the lesson structure. It has to support the outcomes we want to achieve. By using twitter to provide structure to your lesson, it moves from just being a tool to being a way to engage ALL the students in a meaningful way. Some ideas for incorporating the backchannel in the classroom:
As an instant feedback system: Ask questions and students answer via the twitter stream (using the hashtag as marker)
As a way for students to have a voice and to encourage discussion.
Assessment (We will look at twitter assessment instruments like polls and questionnaires in a further day)
Ask students to summarise what everybody are saying. (It is great practise to summarise)
When students work in groups, instruct them to summarise group ideas using twitter- it can result in a diverse cross pollination of ideas. You can then pull everything together by going through the twitter stream.
Students can submit classwork using twitter (e.g. take a photo of work/upload a file) and you can then randomly display and work through submissions.
A good way to get students into the process is to assess their involvement in the lesson via twitter. You can give them an assessment rubric (before the time) of how you will evaluate their class participation in the twitter stream. Here is something to get you started…
Minus a point for every “off topic” remark.
A point for making at least 3 entries (chit-chat relationship building kind of tweets)
Two points for summarising exactly what you/others are saying.
Three points for sharing links that can add to the discussion (articles, simulations etc)
Three points for resp0nding meaningfully to others.
Four points for analysing what you/others are saying and giving their opinion.
Five points for creating innovative content relating to the topic at hand.
You can, at the end of a lesson, use a twitter analysis tool to show the student a graph of their interaction on the twitter stream using tools like Archivist . It is amazing what a little bit of peer pressure can do! We all want a piece of the pie! (Click on image to see the live stats for our #ict4champions workshop stream- do you feature?)
Step 6: Closure
A good way to end of your twitter backchannel supported lesson, is to make a word cloud of all the tweets and show it in a cloud picture. This involves copying and pasting the entire twitter discussion for the lesson into a word cloud maker. A fun one is www.tagxedo.com. It allows you to delete stopwords that are not applicable. It will also show the main strands of the twitter discussion as well as enlarge contributors names according to their involvement – evoking participative peer pressure yet again! You can choose a funky shape and colour scheme to finish things off. Remember to share the cloud picture link as well as the tweet analysis in the backchannel stream…
Activity:
At the end of this activity you should have send at least 5 tweets: Remember to insert teh hastags #day14 #ict4champions
After reading the articles here: http://www.diigo.com/user/maggiev/backchannel%20uses , discuss (in 3-6 tweets) what backchanneling is all about and how you would like to use it in your classroom. (#day14 #ict4champions)
Below are this week’s public, free, and interactive Webinars through LearnCentral.org, the social learning network for education that I work on for Elluminate. The time of the events below will show up automatically in your own time zone when you are registered in LearnCentral and when you have chosen your time zone in your profile.
Event recordings are posted and available after the events if you aren’t able to attend them live. If you are looking for an easy calendar import / RSS feed for these events, you’ll now find a link on your calendar page or the calendar page of specific groups! Be on the lookout for Australia-time-friendly events as part of the new Australia Series, Spanish-language Webinars from the Aula 2.0 Series, and student-oriented sessions from Students 2.0!
See you online!
Steve Hargadon Monday, August 16th
10:45pm PDT (US) / 1:45am EDT (next day) (US) / 5:45pm GMT/UTC (next day) (intl times): AUSTRALIA SERIES “Tech Talk Tuesdays: Making the Impossible Possible – Implementing virtual worlds in traditional school environment,” with host Anne Mirtschin. http://www.learncentral.org/node/90794
Tuesday, August 17th
10am PDT (US) /1pm EDT (US) / 5pm GMT/UTC (next day) (intl times): ELLUMINATE LIVE EVENT SERIES “Instant Learning Impacts Performance: Creating One-Idea/ One-Action Learning Events,” with presenter Ray Jimenez. http://www.learncentral.org/node/90728 (advance registration required)
5pm PDT (US) / 8pm EDT (US) / 12am GMT/UTC (next day) (intl times): FUTURE OF EDUCATION SERIES Kyle Ruddick discusses the “One Day on Earth” project with Steve Hargadon as part of the FutureofEducation.com interview series. http://www.learncentral.org/node/92312
Wednesday, August 18th
3am PDT (US) / 6am EDT (US) / 10am GMT/UTC (intl times): AUSTRALIA SERIES
“eT@lking: Math 2.0 interest group: A year in review and brave new plans,” with host Coach Carole. Maria Droujkova, the founder of Math 2.0 interest group, invites you to participate in the discussion of mathematical communities. http://www.learncentral.org/node/91169
10am PDT (US) / 1pm EDT (US) / 5pm GMT/UTC (intl times): ELLUMINATE LIVE EVENT SERIES Don’t Let The Experts Tell You Powerpoint Sucks! How To Get The Most From Powerpoint When Building E-Learning Courses” with presenter Tom Kuhlmann. http://www.learncentral.org/node/90729 (pre-registration required)
5pm PDT (US) / 8pm EDT (US) / 12am GMT/UTC (next day) (intl times): FUTURE OF EDUCATION SERIES Join Steve Hargadon as he interviews Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond as part of the FutureofEducation.com interview series. http://www.learncentral.org/node/90714
6:30pm PDT (US) / 9:30pm EDT (US) / 1:30am GMT/UTC (next day) (intl times): MATH 2.0 SERIES “Expert Ways of Seeing,.” with host Maria Droujkova. Bruce Kirchoff will discuss teaching in the expert mode allows the student to skip the painful process of making the switch from novice to expert. http://www.learncentral.org/node/92250
7pm PDT (US) / 10pm EDT (US) / 2am GMT/UTC (next day) (intl times): AUSTRALIA SERIES
Join Coach Carole for the latest session of “Moderator Masterclasses: Series 3″ as she demonstrates how to moderate segments within the Elluminate tutorial and use the moderator tools effectively. http://www.learncentral.org/node/88353
4pm PDT (US) / 7pm EDT (US) / 11pm GMT/UTC (intl times): EDUBLOGS SERIES “Edublogs – Serendipity (PD out of a blue sky).” Join Jo Hart a fortnightly unconference sessions. Bring along the burning issues and hot topics YOU would like to discuss. Topic is chosen by poll at the start of the session. http://www.learncentral.org/node/90213
5pm PDT (US) / 8pm EDT (US) / 12am GMT/UTC (next day) (intl times): FUTURE OF EDUCATION SERIES
Steve Hargadon interviews Carol Dweck on her book, Mindset as part of the FutureofEducation interview series. http://www.learncentral.org/node/90715
Saturday, August 21st
9am PDT (US) / 12pm EDT (US) / 4pm GMT/UTC (intl times): CLASSROOM 2.0 LIVE SERIES
“Volunteer Spot,”with co-hosts Kim Caise, Lorna Costantini and Peggy George. Karen Bantuveris, founder of Volunteer Spot, will share about this initiative for mission of enabling anyone to quickly mobilize and coordinate volunteers in their community, congregation and social network. http://www.learncentral.org/node/92315
