Overview of course

Thie course takes place over three days in which 5 hours are spent each day with the teacher. The first 1.5 hours will address concepts and class logistics, and in the second 1.5 hours participants will gravitate to their groups to design activities and report back to the group at large. In the final two hours of each day, students will work in teams on their projects in consultation with the course instructor. It is expected that the most productive students will work on their projects in the evening in preparation for the following day, and in extrapolating the concepts and skills acquired to their actual teaching situations.

Concepts

We will study the following concepts:

• Constructivism and how to apply its principles in teaching
• Social networking and its impacts on collaboration in constructivist learning environments
• The design of appropriate Web-based tasks for students
• Web 2.0 and its use in the design of appropriate constructivist tasks for students

Practice

We will learn about:

• Creating blogs, creating posts, editing posts, tagging them, and understanding blog settings
• Creating wikis, editing them in conjunction with others, using them to design learning environments for teaching
• Designing learning environments appropriate to eLearning
• Finding and utilizing Web 2.0 tools for setting up and enhancing the learning environments designed
• Managing efficiently the collaborative environment through use of bloglines, tags, and other social networking devices

Projects

Teams

The participants in this workshop will identify areas in their teaching practice where the concepts and skills being inculcated might be used in enhancing the learning environments they envisage for their students. Participants with similar goals can form teams to work on designing and implementing these environments using the tools suggested here (or alternatively locating and adapting other tools independenty). Teams will organize their work through a wiki or any other collaborative Web-based device.

Reflection

It is expected that participants will maintain personal blogs and produce at least one post per day reflecting on what they are learning in the workshops.

Deliverables

Students will produce certain deliverable items and link them from the class wiki. These might include:

• Their individual blogs
• Their team wikis
• Teaching and eLearning materials developed by the individuals and teams and stored on the Internet

For comments, suggestions, or further information on this page, contact Vance Stevens, page webmaster.

Last updated: August 1, 2007

Copyright 2008 by Vance Stevens
under Creative Commons License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/