GTA Action Plan: Photo Contest in Picasa Web Albums

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="288" caption="After the Rain - Jana Lohrova"][/caption]

This past summer I was fortunate to attend the Google Teacher Academy where I spent two days meeting many amazing educators while receiving training in Google tools and being inspired by the collective creativity in the room.

Action Plan:

PROBLEM:

Our school only uses GAFE(Google Apps For Education) for faculty, not students, and they don't want to take on student accounts for various reasons, but there is a need for using all the collaborative features.

SOLUTION:

I am going to create and implement a plan to get all ISP Upper School students (about 260) to create their own Google Accounts and then share them with the school so that teachers can utilize the power of Google products with students.  DETAILS:  I will communicate the requirement to students and assist students in creating Google Accounts.  I will facilitate the collection of student email addresses via our website and then push them to PowerSchool and Moodle so that teachers have access to them.  I will launch a photo contest to coincide with our Week Without Walls student trips (using PicasaWebAlbums) that will encourage students to actually get their accounts created so they can participate in the contest while simultaneously engaging them learning to use the collaborative features of PicasaWebAlbums.  Lastly, I will create instructions for teachers explaining the best way to gather account information from students and then share documents with them as well as lead a number of after school Cyber Cafes on Using Google Docs in the Classroom.

Reflection:

[caption id="attachment_362" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Everyone Enjoying Paris to the Fullest - Lucie Soudkova"][/caption]

For the most part, my action plan was successful.  That is not to say there weren't some hiccups along the way. In a nutshell, I met my goal of getting all of our students set up with a Google Account and all of those accounts recorded into our various systems.  The photo contest was really a bonus and a fun way to go about getting all students to sign up for an account.

All of our students have google accounts.  These accounts are used as their "professional" or "school" accounts and are connected to any other accounts they create for school purposes such as Youtube, Turnitin.com etc.

We recorded each student's google account info in our Learning Management System (Moodle) and Student Information System (PowerSchool).  Now, when a new student enrolls in our Upper School we ask them to create a google account, then use that info to populate our systems such as those listed above and Edublogs.

Using the Photo Contest as a catalyst for getting all students to create their accounts worked well…for account creation.  Students wanted to contribute photos and view each others' photos of our Week Without Walls.  Most students created their accounts by the deadline and I only had to chase down a few of them.  From the outside, the photo contest ran smoothly, although I did encounter some unexpected issues with using Picasa for this event.

I used Google Sites to create a portal for the Photo Contest, and used PicasaWebAlbums as a way to share albums to students so that they could submit photos to various categories.  You can view the portal here.

The issues with PicasaWebAlbums mainly had to do with sharing and specifically me sharing with too many students in a short period of time.  I needed to share 4 albums to 300 people so that they could have the ability to upload to the albums.  This was too much for Picasa; it seems Google thought I was spamming if I shared with too many people too often.  I was finally able to share everything necessary in small batches over about 10 days, which was a big problem since I wanted to share everything out before students went on their trips.  I'm not sure if Google has changed any of this, but I know with the advent of Google Plus they've been making some changes to Picasa Web Albums.  Maybe this is easier to do now - I'm not sure, but I definitely would look into the sharing features and limitations before I tried another photo contest using Picasa.

My biggest personal learnings were associated with both Google Sites and Picasa Web Albums.  I had not created a Google Site prior to this, and so this project really had me digging deep into the menus to see just what Sites could do.  The visual nature of a photo contest lent itself to embedding of media, slideshows and instructions.  I'm pretty confident with Sites now and feel that I can create sites pretty quickly and easily.  I think Google Sites are fabulous for people don't have advanced web design skills but who need to create a site for an event, a class, or for hosting any sort of information.

Final Thought:

My action plan was centered around the idea that we wanted a way to utilize the power of Google Apps without hosting our student accounts on our domains.  While I like having our student accounts off the domain, giving students complete ownership, this set up does have drawbacks.  It just isn't as smooth to share things with students as it would be if they were organized in the teacher contacts and possible in groups.  However, I do think that having students off domain is possible, and should not be considered a barrier to effectively using the collaborative power of Google Apps if a teacher is in a situation where the school does not or will not put students on Google Apps.  I'd love to hear about other schools that are having success with this same sort of set-up.

Would You Hire You?

As part of our roll-out of a revamped Digital Citizenship Agreement (formerly Acceptable Use Policy), we had the opportunity in an advisory class session to engage our Upper School students in thinking about their online identity - their personal brand.  @bobthebrarian and I created a lesson, Would You hire You?, designed to have students evaluate their digital footprints and reflect on how they are portraying themselves to university admissions officers and potential employers.

Lesson Materials

Presentation (with teacher notes included)

Teacher Notes for Presentation in PDF

Handout PDF

Reflection

I was fortunate to substitute for a regular advisor at the last minute.  My group of 12 students was mostly engaged for the entire lesson and gave me some good insight in our debrief at the end. We had a good discussion, although I wished I would have come up with debrief questions prior to "on the spot."  While a majority of the students rated themselves to have mainly positive digital footprints, it was also good to hear how many of them had a good grasp of privacy settings and other strategies.  In fact, every hand went up when I asked "who has ever asked a friend to remove a photo or other content from a social network?".  You can look at that as 1) there are photos out there of all the students behaving badly, or that 2) all students know the appropriate steps to advocate for themselves and attempt to remove potentially damaging photos - I'm choosing the second view.

IB Group IV Projects - Using Google Maps

As an experiment, we mixed a combustive concoction of eight groups of motivated students working on IB Group IV Science projects, eight adult supervisors, one large nature reserve (Divoka Sarka in Prague) two days of incredible weather, numerous science and technology tools, Google maps, and generous portions of communication, collaboration, and creativity opportunities that resulted in a learning that exceeded our expectations.  Below are my reflections on two tremendous days of thinking and learning.


This is an example of one team's map. View Group 4 ISP 2011: Team 4 in a larger map


Collaboration: The IB Group IV project is all about personal skills and how students are able to work in a group, look at themselves as learners and reflect on their strengths and weaknesses. I was fortunate enough to be assigned my own group of students to supervise and was able to watch them work through  a number of obstacles throughout the project.  Over and over again I was reminded about the importance of group work, collaboration skills and the power of many minds working together on the same problem. I really was amazed by the students, their maturity, their ability to look at any problem from multiple angles and to defer to each other when neccesary.  It got me thinking about how we really should have higher expectations for groups than we do for individuals.

Collaboration Continued: It is appropriate that the two days were planned not by one teacher, but by a group of teachers.  It would not have been nearly as smooth, powerful or well-organized,  had one person been tasked with developing the project on their own, but rather it was put together by a group of teachers each with different strengths.  There really isn't anything that is more satisfying to me professionally than working on a team of educators devoted to providing a unique and authentic learning experience for students.  The plan truly was a collaborative effort by a number of teachers who brought various  and diverse viewpoints and ideas to the table.  In the end the group was able to refine the program to the point that, even it its first year, it was extremely successful.  Again, the power of groups over individuals was made clearer to me.  I just wish our education system valued collaboration more and am reminded that we must all push for more opportunities to work side by side, sharing and learning with and from our colleagues.

Not Over Rubricised (or Teacher as Shoulder Shrugger): One thing that I really liked about the Group IV project is that it isn't over rubricised.  The students were only graded on three criteria (none of which had anything to do with content by the way).  There was a theme (Preserving the Natural Heritage of Divoka Sarka in the Czech Republic), and we did set some general parameters for their presentations such as: data must be displayed in a Google Map and there should be a video detailing your data collection method.  Other than that, students had to come up with a hypothesis, research question, data collection method, google map, and presentation.  Of course there were many times throughout the project that a student would turn to me and ask a question about what I thought of one of their ideas.  I just shrugged my shoulders.  At first they hated this, and seemed to not know what to do next, but eventually they would just turn back to each other and share ideas or otherwise work towards a group consensus.  They got better and better at it. From this experience I was reminded how much students grow to depend on our instructions - how to format, how to turn it in, where to put the staple, to use blue or black ink or pencil, double space or single space, on and on.  Teachers often have so many rules on assignments  that students get so caught up in following them they don't use their creativity.  I loved how much this project brought out student creativity.  I loved standing back, letting the students flail, fail and then sort it out.  And they always did sort it out.  In fact, even when I wanted to intervene, and get them going in the right direction, they'd eventually figure it out and end up doing something that was even better than what I had in mind.

Problem Solving: During John Davitt's recent visit, he and I talked about how amazing it is to watch students come up with solutions and choices of tools to solve problems when we don't show them how to do it our way.  In this project,  just like we didn't over rubricise it, we didn't give student instructions on how to do everything.  We left it up to them.  We figured they could bring their own still cameras, video cameras, downloading cords and the like.  Again they amazed me.  They did bring their own cameras, but they mostly used phones, because they could just upload the photos directly to Flickr or Picasa and share them to the map -  all wirelessly.  Two tools that really took me by surprise were Skype and an iPad.  One group included a girl who had recently injured her leg and was confined to a wheel chair and unable to join us in the forest.  Later we learned that the students used the unfortunate injury to their advantage.  They were Skyping GPS coordinates and other data back to the injured student who was hard at work plotting it all on the Google Map.  Again, I was reminded how creative students can be when left alone to choose their own method for solving a problem.

Students teaching Students: There were numerous opportunities for students to solve authentic problems that cropped up.  And often part of the problem solving would require that one student with specific knowledge or skills teach another student.  One student wanted to display two different graphs superimposed one over the other.  Of course this could have been done a number of ways, but in this instance one student taught another student how to use Photoshop to complete the task.  I also witnessed students teaching each other to use Quicktime, Picassa, Flickr, Excel, and of course Google Maps.  It was exciting and rewarding to see different students taking the lead and assisting others when they had the expertise necessary.

Unplanned, but Powerful Learnings: Perhaps the biggest take away for me was this idea that there was an immense amount of learning that was not planned by the teacher.  I was reminded just how powerful open-ended, authentic, inquiry based learning can be.

Student Choice/ownership: One thing that I heard the supervisors talking about was their surprise at how the students stayed motivated throughout the entire process.  I personally felt that the students actually gained momentum and that the motivation increased as time went on.  I can only assume that this was because the research questions, the process and the end product were all student owned.  The buy-in was amazing and they all had pride in what they were producing.  I'm reminded to try to incorporate as much student choice into assessments as possible.

Non-Traditional Classroom: Another key ingredient that helped to make this project such a success was the venue.  We were fortunate to be able to use a picturesque nature reserve on two beautiful days.  Being outside, and learning in a non-traditional setting definitely added a uniqueness factor that increased motivation.  But this got me thinking about the frequency of projects such as this one and how difficult they are to work into our traditional school day schedule.  Many schools try to incorporate a "classroom without walls" atmosphere through field trips, or designated two-day to week long programs, but they are often one offs that don't tie that closely to the curriculum.  Schools should be looking at flexible scheduling that would allow for more alternative, non-traditional teaching opportunities.   As one student reflected, "If we started every day of school out in the forest we'd be so much more enthusiastic about learning."

This is a conglomeration of maps from all 8 teams. View Group IV CONSOLIDATED Map 2011 in a larger map

John Davitt Visits

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We were fortunate to have John Davitt, a writer, broadcaster and digital tool maker, be our school's special guest the past two days. Previously I was inspired by John's presentations as a keynote speaker and workshop leader at a conference and wrote about that experience on my blog. John met with different groups such as the librarians, administrators and IT specialists, spoke to the middle school students at an assembly, and guest-taught a number of classes in the elementary, middle and upper schools utilizing his Learning Event Generator and some outdoor learning (similar to this one) . He presented “How Technology can Fit and Enhance Learning” to a mixed audience of students, teachers, and parents. These past two days were filled with a multitude of learning opportunities. If I were to go into detail about each profound thought that came from these two days, this post would go on and on.  Instead,  I'll offer just a few personal reflections:

• Teachers need to become better at letting go and letting students own the learning.


• Let students demonstrate their knowledge in different ways - some they are comfortable with, and some they are not.


• In group work, students might go off in the wrong direction, but there is learning happening as they correct their course - learning that the teacher could not have planned for.


• The power of group learning is underrated - Groups of students can achieve greater heights than individuals.


• Given a problem with very little direction on how to solve it students will amaze you with their problem solving skills, often utilizing tools and techniques that the teacher might not have thought of.


• There are many different approaches to powerful learning and as teachers we need to be offering our diverse learners different ways of learning and demonstrating learning.


• There is a struggle (that enhances and consolidates learning) when you have to demonstrate learning in a way that you are not comfortable with.

Lastly, I would like to thank John Davitt for his thoughtful insights, his energy and generosity (he is leaving us with some copies of the Learning Score, which I will write more about later)  .  I would encourage any school out there to bring John to your campus if you have a chance.  You can learn more about John Davitt at his blog, his website or on twitter.

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