Kimberly Brueck (Instructional Technologist), Cindy Brown (Associate Principle), and Craig McKendry (Math Teacher) from Green High School presented on using blended learning to encourage professional development and innovative teaching. Although geared towards K-12 I decided to attend anyway in hopes of more universally helpful principles and tips.
(Unfortunately the presentation was much more of a tour of Moodle than it was a guide to best practices in collaboration.)
Kimberly started off polling the audience about what their job is. The crowd was a mix of principals, professional development specialists, technology specialists, and library technologists.
Kimberly then encouraged us to be willing to envision something “complex” in planning for online learning. She encouraged study of options and ensuring that there is sufficient infrastructure, robust training, and clear expectations. Additionally, it is highly recommended to have dedicated support and development personnel.
The Green High school district used Moodle, a free and open source Learning Management System.
Starting small
Before launching into online learning, Green High decided to start by building a professional learning network. They began by converting all hand-out materials to a one-stop-shop online source. This included:
- Staff handbook
- Staff directory
- Links to important information
- Instructions for staff
Additionally, they began in a blended format while they acclimated the staff to using the online tools. They set up a school-wide discussion forum to support teachers. Kimberly encouraged those wanting to dive in to automate tasks normally done on paper, demonstrate collaborative features, and eventually to outright require collaboration from teachers.
Avoid Clutter & Reinvention
Kimberly had these tips:
- Stay focused on district and building goals
- Don’t “crowd the inbox” of staff members
- Make a long term commitment to developing the online learning environment.
- Be prepared to meet people where they are and then move forward.
At this point Cindy took control to show us the setup of their Moodle homepage. She gave us a tour of all the kinds of documents they had posted on their Moodle site.
Cindy explained how Moodle helps them to keep to keep their eye on the goal of accomplishing teaching and curriculum goals.
Craig speaks up
Craig took over at this point. He became interested in Moodle through a course he took from U of Akron. Akron used Springboard (another LMS) and Craig really enjoyed the interaction and reduced paper overhead in taking the class. All class assignments were downloaded from the web and most class participants had laptops.
Craig uses Moodle in his math classes to post lessons and notes as well as quizzes.
Mike’s Take:
The presentation provided a good overview for school districts who have yet to dive into teaching online and supporting faculty development with online learning tools. It wasn’t much up my alley because I’m already in a college system that is using these tools for online courses.
Moodle has always looked really busy to me. Like it has too much clutter in your face. That said, it’s great to have a free and open source option for learning management.
Presenters Gail Greenberg and Nadine Grimm discussed their digital exhibits project for encouraging students to higher-order thinking. Utilizing the free and open source Omeka, they built a virtual “primary source exhibit.”
Michael Edwards is an Instructional Designer for the 
Stepping out of the box: Using Parody and Humor to engage students /OETC2010
Daniel Hoppe and Garrick Ducat of Mercy College presented on the use of humor for engaging students.
Benefits to laughing in the classroom
Garrick began the presentation by noting that there isn’t a lot of research out there about using humor to support learning. The biggest problem facing students is high anxiety. Humor helps diminish that. Humor also helps with retention of knowledge.
Daniel described a healthcare marketing class that was facing some challenges in motivating student creativity. They hoped to make a change to increase student retention and comprehension. Instead of the typical “talking head” video to introduce a section, Garrick had another idea. They would parody of NBC’s The Office to create engaging and humorous videos.
Instructional Design: Finding a way to meet a learning objective
The goal of Daniel and Garrick’s project was to develop a learning resource that could demonstrate how certain marketing concepts are applied by showing situations students could relate to and easily interpret.
Their process:
Dan’s character was modeled after Michael Scott and Garrick after Jim. The important thing was to model the humor dynamics between different kinds of characters.
To write the script they did not want a long video. After about 15 minutes “students are gone.” They also wanted to be able to deliver it over the web using their school’s streaming server.
Leading up to shooting they had script readings to help people get into character. Ad-libbing was encouraged for some emergent humor.
They shot video for about an hour and took 3-4 hours to edit the footage. (Mike sez: This is quite fast for a video project!)
The video itself was hilarious and I hope they post it publicly so I can link to it. It was quite funny!
Assessing Learning
To assess learning they used a combination of the following:
The journals didn’t quite give them the feedback they needed. While student feedback was positive it was more in the form of praise for the humor of the video (”Hilarious! I showed my wife!”). To supplement the assessment effort they had quizzes to demonstrate knowledge retention. Additionally there were two synchronous chats for each module. Finally there were marketing projects to give students a chance to demonstrate their learning.
Dan said after they implemented this approach that the student projects were the highest quality he had ever seen.
Mike’s take:
Dan and Garrick did a phenomenal job not only entertaining us, but also by describing a clear process for creating engaging videos. They discouraged boring, long lecture style videos that mainly feature a “talking head” and encouraged creativity.