in brief:
the project starts from the premise that the culture of blindly 'locking and blocking' in the classroom is no longer acceptable:
- it does not prepare young people for the real world
- it is liable to be dangerous (you wouldn't try to enhance water safety by keeping children away from water until they were 16 then throwing them off the pier...)
- it misses some outstanding learning opportunities
- it is disengaging ("every turned off device is a turned off child")
- it is wasteful of resources
- ...and as many, many teachers students and schools are finding, it is uneccesary.
The aim of the "cloudlearn" research project is to source, collate, reflect on and publish proven effective practice from experienced classroom teachers and practitioners - building from what worked for them, in their cultural and educational context, to offer a portfolio of general and proven approaches.
New technologies will emerge, ever faster, and our ambitious overarching aim is to suggest strategies that may have the best chance of working to take best advantage of new as yet unknown technologies, but safely..
The end-of-the-year outcome is to provide sets of strategies and advice, both specific and generic, for adults and organisations, for teachers and their students see the need to move beyond "locking and blocking".
We anticipate the advice sheets may also be useful sto care homes, youth clubs and, of course, parents.
How the project will work:
the project will harness the expertise of five educational practitioners (our classroom based 'facilitators') who already have some reputation - perhaps in Twitter or elsewhere - for their active and open use of new technologies, combined with ingenuity. We are not looking for technology fetishists, but for established good classroom practitioners.
The five 'facilitators' will collect positive (and negative) experiences in the following areas:
- asynchronous social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc);
- synchronous social networking (Skype, web cams)
- user generated video and audio (YouTube, Audioboo, etc);
- portable devices and smart phones;
- contributory asynchronous web sites (blogs/wikis)
...of course those areas overlap (Twitter on the phone etc) and so will our conversations.
The research takes place with a range of online activties - allowing practitioners from all over the country and other countries to take part actively. There will formal thanks for our more active contributors (!). The project will have an international dimension. Again, that may grow further after the initial year of research.
We anticipate that initial discussions will take place in a closed community where 'open' discussion can take place and 'facilitators' can engage participants in constructive dialogue and collect practice which has been negative as well as positive.
From these early collections of practice the discussion will be opened to all and early hunches / certainties will be available for comment and contribution.
These details are indicative rather than prescriptive - this is a crowd-sourced, bottom up project and liable to change, of course.
draft website
this page last updated Sunday, January 9, 2011 15:22