Playing to Learn? How to get fun back into education

Image by Getty Images via @daylife A rich and engaging resource created in Prezi by Maria Andersen (which really models some of the potential of the platform, and adds a certain texture to the 'message'). You could skip through this presentation, or spend hours exploring the multimedia (look out in particular for the Pirates of the Caribbean / Bloom's Taxonomy).

The focus is maths, but the relevance is obvious for any discipline, and the age group is adult...but, again, well worth re-visiting what is happening with younger learners.

The description from the site reads: "Playing to Learn? - Children love to learn, but at some point they lose that and become adults that don't like formal learning. Let's explore why "play" has gotten such a bad rap and figure out how to get it back in education."

Playing to Learn? on Prezi

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Virtually Engaged! Building Virtual Professional Development Communities

This is the Prezi I developed to go with a presentation I gave at Shar-E-Fest. The Prezi resource was designed to be used as a presentation at the 'top' level, but if you look closer, and drill down (a bit like a treasure hunt), you will find heaps more detail. Have fun!!!

The abstract reads as follows: "Current models of Professional Development (PD) provision are being evaluated. As a result, one of the mainstays of education intuitions, the generic workshop, has been identified as having number of fundamental flaws. Hand-in-hand with this is the request by teachers for increased PD to help them with ICT Enhanced Learning and Teaching (ICTELT) projects. The Virtual Professional Development (VPD) Model has been developed in response to these factors. VPD is based around a community of learning, with a goal to provide peer-supported PD around ICTELT.

There are currently ten tertiary, secondary and primary school teachers from a variety of locations ranging from Kaitaia to Canterbury involved in this pilot initiative. The national facilitator works with these teachers to develop their own highly-contextualised learning plans. After an initial face-to-face meeting the group now meets regularly using the Internet based webinar tool Adobe Connect to share skills, experiences and ideas and to enable peer mentoring relationships to build. Facilitated sessions are at a time and place which is flexible to each teacher\'s needs. These exchanges are complemented by interactions within a social networking space (Ning), as well as through access to their own \'sandpit\' courses in a learning management system (Moodle), where they have the opportunity to experiment and try out skills before going live with learners. Skill-sets and experience vary in the VPD group, and this is offering great opportunities for participants to take on facilitator and learner roles.

The main factors that are becoming apparent from the evaluations to date is that the VPD model could be effective for future PD initiatives. However unlike generic workshops, VPD is mainly 1) about affective factors - community, belonging and relationships; 2) a personalised, contextualised curriculum; and 3) an experience where upskilling takes second place to a teacher\'s own learning \'journey\' which is all about their identity as educators and their beliefs about learning."

Virtually Engaged! Building Virtual Professional Development Communities on Prezi

Please cite as: Owen, H. (2010, 27-28 September). Virtually Engaged! Building Virtual Professional Development Communities. Paper presented at the Shar-E-fest Conference.

Facilitating students to create their own content (Thom Cochrane, Moodle Moot 2010)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Thom started the session by grabbing everyone's attention with a piece of model. He then want on to suggest that students should be creating their own content rather than teachers pushing out content to them - as such, the push technologies in Moodle are only used minimally.

The audience was then encouraged to sign into Thom's Moodle course (Unitec NZ), and to get out their mobile phones for the session.

The notion of mobile sharing multimedia via smartphones, was suggested as a way of bridging learning contexts and to promote social collaboration. Vox blog was used as an ePortfolio platform partly because it did not have the games, gifts and other gizmos that take up space and have little educational purpose.

The buzz in the room went up as people used Twitter, mobile phones, and laptops to vote via Poll Everywhere about the type of phones they have. Most people (24%) have a camera phone, and 24% had a smart phone. It was certainly an effective way of engaging the audience! The next tool that Thom looked at was Prezi, and he illustrated its use by showing a student's work, which she had created via her mobile phone.

Main costs for using this type of mobile learning is when students start uploading large amounts of data. So a 3.2 MP photo will cost about 5 cents, and 1 minute of streaming video about 60 cents. Students can be encouraged to upload larger files via a laptop or desktop computer to help keep the costs down.

Mobile learning certainly seems to be the way of the future as it empowers students, provides authentic audiences, encourages engagement and ownership, and allows for any time, any place learning. The focus, however, needs to be on what can be achieved with this alternative learning experience, rather than the tools themselves.

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• Moodle Multimedia (slideshare.net)