Course 2: Final Project

For my final project I worked with Luiz Mello and Shalene Huth. We created a professional development session for teachers around the ISTE Educators strand Citizen.

I was the one to pitch the idea to them, creating a group with someone from primary, middle school, and secondary. My original idea looks nothing like the end product. Originally I pitched a self-paced PD in the form of an iBook that teachers could work through to improve their knowledge of the Citizen strand. Once collaboration kicked in, this quickly took a turn towards our final outcome. We decided to make four 30-minute PD videos with timers embedded for teachers to complete tasks and activities inside a printed workbook. 

When pitching the idea, I chose this option because I felt like it would be most relevant to group members from around the world. I wanted to do something that we could all potentially use.

We connected on Twitter and then began meeting once a week for the duration of Course 2. Some meetings were longer than others, some were shorter check ins, but all were enjoyable and productive. We worked together on things during these meetings and then divided up jobs for the rest of the week before we met again. All three of us are in different time zones. Russia, China, and Vietnam. However, because of Covid-19 and learning from home, our schedules seemed to work out. 

It was a challenging time of the year to work on a group project. We went from teaching from home (hard!) to being back in the classroom (a whole lot of new challenges!), plus normal end of year things happening.

The team I work with at school are super easy to collaborate with. We are almost always sitting in the same room if we are not teaching (by choice). This is my collaboration norm. As and when things arise, we talk about it, weigh options, help eachother out, and decide how to move forward. Because I am now used to this, collaborating with people around the world was a little more difficult. Also, it was a little less authentic than my last final project for course one which I was using in real time. Because of this, it was a little harder to find inspiration and time to keep coming back to the project.

This experience was so tightly related to the weekly outcomes for Course 2. I was collaborating on the project the whole time, but was behind on the blog posts and weekly readings. When I finally was catching up, the readings were inspiring me to adapt and add to our final project. I actually felt like it was easier to go through the course as well because I had taken such a deep dive into the Citizen strand. 

Here are our four videos:

3A

3B

3C

3D

Below is a pdf of our workboo, and here is a live link in case things change or are edited.
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