Jumping into Deep Learning

Last year my students and I participated in a twitter chat about New Pedagogies for Deep Learning during their annual global event. It was such a great experience that I made it a priority point to participate in this years event. As I kept my eyes open for information about this years conference, I stumbled across this tweet from our 21st Century Learning Consultant, Ferdinand Krauss:

Ferdinand's tweet encouraged students and teachers to participate in this years NPDL deep learning task. He also attached the task and other important information:

Thanks to Ferdinand, I had everything I needed to get started with my students. The prompt involved students to think about "What the world needs now" and to share their ideas to develop global competencies in our school/town/city/nation. The students started by taking a look at the UN Sustainable Goals website. We decided that each student would research one of the sustainable goals and then share their knowledge/new learning using 1 google slide. Once the students finished their slide, they would share it with me and I put them all together into a single slide show.

At this point we seemed ready and excited to share our preparation for the global discussion. As a class, we had accumulated information about the sustainable goals and looked forward to applying some of our knowledge to talk about what we think the world needs right now. We tweeted out our work and responded to people who were following the #npdlworldneeds tag on twitter. 

People were seeing our work and tweeting about it and connecting with us. Things started to feel "real" for the students and they had a 'global' audience that could could interact with.

We were especially fortunate to connect with two educators from our school board who were in attendance at the NPDL conference in Vancouver - Kelly Roberts (WCDSB Research Coordinator) and Richard Setler (VP at St. Kateri Tekawitha). They provided us with prompts to consider and and even recorded a video for us while they were at the conference.

We responded to their video by creating a quick one of our own...

Within a week of returning from Vancouver, Richard and Kelly connected with our class via Google Hangout to share their experience and to continue to prompt the students to think deeper and to work on using the NPDL competencies to analyze situations and problem solve. 

Shortly after this hangout Richard reached out to us with a wonderful opportunity to work with a grade 1/2 class at his school.

The students were more than happy to oblige.

This new connection with Ms. V and her grade 1/2 students is proving to be an excellent learning opportunity. The grade 4/5 students are happy to help out the primary students and are challenging themselves with the questions/prompts coming from Richard and Ms. V. The discussions have been deep - allowing students to think about their perspectives and then explain their thinking. Students are respectfully challenging each others thoughts/opinions while they decide what information they want to provide the grade 1/2 students with. 

Having gone back and forth over Twitter, we are now working on bringing the students face to face in a Google Hangout. 

We are scheduled to meet with Ms. V's class early next week. The students are really looking forward to it. As their classroom teacher, I am quite impressed with the effort they are putting into this activity as I observe them work through it. Thanks to Richard and Ms. V, I am provided with the opportunity to assess my students with respect to the skill sets known as the 6C's (see below). My assessment will help me determine where my students are at with respect to the competencies and what my next steps will be to help my students attain the skills needed to excel in our complex world. 

Screen shot taken from http://npdl.global/

The Learning continues as we CONNECT

Our connection with +Carlos Roque's class in Cambridge is taking off! Carlos' students have provided my students with two Math tasks that we have worked through. The activities that we are engaging in are exciting to the students and provides them with 'real life' reasons to "do" Math. It's interesting to hear them and watch them work on solving the patterning questions that have been shared with us via Google Drive.

Since the activities are being created by students for students, there seems to be a lot more engagement and 'pride' in creating and completing tasks. It's not all work though, there is some fun happening as well. Carlos' class sent us a Halloween message via YouTube - check it out:

Prior to this message by Carlos's students we had created two videos for them - answering the Math tasks that they had sent to us. Jeff represents our class in sharing our process/answer in the first video and Amanda represents our class in sharing our response in the second video. 

I'm sure you have noticed that I am not sharing the identity of the students in my class. For recorded videos that live on the Internet, my students and I have decided not to share their identity. However, that doesn't stop us from using our audio which the students are very excited about. It may lead to a few podcasts which are another way for us to connect with other classes and share our learning.

We recently created a Math activity for Mr. Roque's class via Google Docs. We shared the Doc with Mr. Roque and then made a short video about it:

We look forward to hearing back from our friends in Cambridge and can't wait for our next live meeting with them. It certainly is a valuable connection for the teachers and students involved. As we progress on our learning journey, Mr. Roque and I continue to learn how to leverage the tech tools involved in getting our classes together. As we are learning, so are our students - first hand and in real time. They know that the walls that surround our classrooms are simply physical barriers that protect us from the elements, not from learning with anyone in the world that has access to technology. Until our next post, get and/or stay connected!