Welcome to day four of the 2015 K12Online Conference! All presentations are listed and linked on our main conference schedule.
Week One – Today we have three presentations. Take your time to enjoy them. Share what you learn with your colleagues. You can always come back to view sessions you missed or those you want to see again. Everything is archived. Why not add a comment after watching the session!
For a long time we have been calling for learner autonomy. We have been asking teachers to help their learners take responsibility of their learning and enjoy doing that. From my point of view, we shouldnt be asking teachers to do that, we should be helping them and guiding them how to do it. Helping them in such a way would urge them to seek Professional Development which means developing their teaching skills and updating their teaching knowledge lifelong. Not only that, but we should cooperate with them to help them apply what they study successfully.
Such a cause has become a community cause not a personal one. Enhancing education can change generations, not to mention the community. Its a great call that requires cooperation from all sides involved. From here came our idea of gathering scholars, teachers and specialists to help change the mindset of teachers to accept PD. We also aim at exchanging experiences and helping each other with teaching difficulties on/off site.
Through my presentation, I would like to speak about how we started, how we used Discussions among teachers to help exchange ideas and open more doors for teachers to seek PD and how we were also happy to provide back advice for teachers who faced difficulties in class. Id like also to give an idea about the different free activities that we hold online and on site to spread the idea and our efforts to communicate and cooperate with different organizations and NGOs to get to as many teachers as possible in our community and help raise the educational stake in our country.
Presenter: Steve Sherman Location: Cape Town, South Africa @LivingMaths
Presentation Title: Merry Makers
Presentation Description: As the Head of the Imagination Chapter in Cape Town, I get to help young students and their parents get in touch with their creative juices every week. I then connect with other chapter leaders around the world and we share our ideas and experiences. I will include footage and photos in my presentation, share ideas and give you a small taste of some of our projects. I hope that you are encouraged to create a maker space at school and promote making activities to your students.
Presentation Description: For a few years, teachers in the New York City Writing Project and teachers whose students post and comment on Youth Voices have been using online annotation to move students toward critical careful reading, and we have learned how public, online annotation can add collaborative reading to the mix. Recently, we’ve been taking a a closer look at three text-commenting tools: 1) Hypothes.is https://hypothes.is, 2) NowComment https://nowcomment.com, and 3) Lit Genius http://lit.genius.com and beta.genius. We invite you to join us in this inquiry. We are proposing that we ask about the affordances of each of these tools and work them with other teachers, with our students, and with different types of texts.