Last weekend, I participated in Create the Future: Become a 21st Century Learner workshop led by Kim Cofino and Julie Lindsay. The well-organized, thought-provoking activities and the people there made for an excellent workshop. I spent two days in a small team of four. (A quick shout out to Heather, Ben, and Richard. I’ll get my stuff on the wiki soon. Promise.) We all worked in teams to create globally creative projects to take back to our respective schools. This wasn’t an academic exercise. It should fly. But one question pestered me throughout the two days. How can I justify participating in a globally collaborative project?

The standard answer here goes something like, “Students should participate in globally collaborative projects to sharpen their collaboration skills, gain awareness of different perspectives, and learn to be creative problem solvers in today’s connected world.” I get that. But when teachers tell me they don’t have time to participate in a globally collaborative project, I get that too. It’s not, however, really about being too busy. It’s about reaching learning goals before the unit is up and we’re on to another one. That NETS•S talk about connecting, creating, and collaborating is all fine but this current unit of inquiry is the real deal. We have learning goals. How can that project take my students closer to taking action on their inquiries? That’s what it’s really about.

A globally collaborative project should take students closer to their learning goals in ways that they could not do otherwise.

Our project focused on the upcoming grade 5 exhibition. Since all of us except Heather, a grade 3 teacher, have exhibitions coming up it seemed a natural fit for a collaborative project. (Heather participated in the planning of this project even though it would not be one that her students could join. Thanks Heather!) In a nut shell, it’s about opening up reflection. Students reflect on their learning experiences and share their reflections with teachers, classmates, and fellow exhibition students at BISS (Ben) and SSIS (Richard). Why bother? Students can share with each other in the classroom. And how will this project generate better reflections and create a better reflection experience? In the past, reflections were hand written in notebooks and shared mostly with teachers and sometimes with classmates. Pretty closed. Why open reflections? Why share with others? If this project is going to fly, we have to answer those questions and build the project upon those answers.

Here’s what we came up with. We believe that sharing is learning. And that students sharing with students in other schools will draw out from students more meaningful reflections because they will connect with students based not on proximity but common interests. And here’s what this reflection sharing looks like. We have a home base. It’s a VoiceThread group. Students create their reflections on VoiceThread and then share them with student groups formed around a common interest, maybe a line of inquiry. Students view and listen to the voicethreads that resonate with them the most. They then comment on the reflection. Ideally, it is a thoughtful comment that helps the author move forward. And maybe the reflection reveals to the viewers something new and useful as well. The aim here is to form a community of learners who work together to move forward together. That kind of experience, I believe, is more meaningful and sustainable than one that can be achieved without such collaboration. But I don’t know and I’m very eager to find out.

I’m going to pitch this idea to the grade 5 team next week. Their first question will probably focus on how is that better than what we are doing already. Good question. I’ll tell them creating situations for students to follow and act on their interests is creating inquiry-based learning experiences. If we want students to deepen their engagement in their reflections, then we want them to connect with authentic audiences that matter to them. Maybe they can get that right in their own classroom. Great! But maybe they can’t. Ultimately, we need to make sure they can get a learning environment that fits. In this case, an open and collaborative approach will let that happen. Do you think it will fly?

Works for Me
It’s easy to build a complex survey with Zoomerang. You get an intuitive workspace with useful features. The duplicate feature, for example, trimmed a couple of hours off the total time (about four hours) it took me to build the first survey. It allowed me to duplicate a question with all of its formatting and paste it into the survey. I would then just need to revise the question. A great time saver! Otherwise, I would have to write the question and then format the response type over and over again (button, multiple answer, rating, open-ended, etc.). To check the look and functions, Zoomerang gives you an easy to use preview button for your survey.

There is a feature that allows us to direct people to certain questions based on their answers. If a parent indicates she only has children in the MYP program, then she is only given the MYP specific questions. Likewise, parents with DP students only see the DP questions. Creating this skip logic was kind of tricky because I had to consider three sets of questions (PYP, MYP, and DP) but once I got my head around the idea it was easy to do with Zoomerang’s Add a Skip feature at the bottom of each page.

A few other useful features… Zoomerang gives a wide selection of question types to choose from. However, we wanted more flexibility with the Comments feature. I’ll discuss that below. We could build customized intro and thank you pages easily. And once I had one survey created, I could use it as a template to create another one. I created the student survey this way by copying the parent survey. I still had to go in and revise the questions and skip logic, but this saved me the effort and time of setting up the all of the question and response formats. Another great time saver! For questions that are not open-ended, we can generate customized color charts and then download them or load them into a presentation. We haven’t used that feature yet, but it looks like a handy one for sharing the results.

Not So Good
We felt limited when building our question types. We wanted to provide a text box for additional comments into nearly every response. However, the only way I found to do this was by using a rating scale – matrix type question. It wasn’t our preferred question type but we found a way to make it work for us. You can see an example in the image above. I don’t like the look and feel of that layout. That line disrupts the flow and the buttons with numbers are repetitive. I would rank this low in readability but it got the job done.

Analyzing results did not turn out to be as easy as we had anticipated. We wanted to extrapolate and print individual responses but found no easy way to do this. It has to be done individually and each print job requires seven clicks. It’s a tedious and time consuming job. I was hoping for one button that would print out individual responses. There is a button that prints out an overview. That’s useful but we need more buttons like that which allow us to extrapolate specified data to print. As it is, we can get it done but it takes too much manual labor to be considered an efficient process.

Would I use Zoomerang again? Maybe. I’m pretty new at this and still I found the surveys easy to build. I didn’t use them but tutorials are readily available to learn more. When it comes time for another survey, I’m sure that I will look around for online surveys that allow for a wider use of a text box for additional comments and more granular control when it comes time to analyze survey results.

A video tutorial on Audacity.

Basically, we now have a collection of Web-based video tutorials on a wide variety of tools. We also have tutorials on 21st century skills workshops and projects. From their blog,

Atomic Learning promotes the practical application of technology in education. Thousands of schools, colleges, and universities have made Atomic Learning an integral part of their professional development programs, a valuable curriculum supplement and an anytime/anywhere software training resource.

I think we’ll like the anytime/anywhere access (Internet connection required) to these resources. We purchased this collection for teachers and students. Early next week I’ll meet with a rep from Atomic Learning to discuss our available features and how to make the most of them.

For now, I know I will be using the tutorials to support our Tech20 sessions which focus on the key tech skills teachers need at IST. I’ll also use the 21st Century Skills Workshops to support our discussions about what teaching and learning looks like at IST today. How about you? How will you use these tutorials?