On Friday I jumped in my car to drive the 500 kilometers from Wollongong to Queanbeyan, to make the human connection with a group of 3 eager TAFE teachers from this country town near Canberra. Self-confessing to having basic IT skills they wanted to make the leap from the whiteboard to teaching online. My job was to re-engage them after their 3yr hiatus in how the LMS worked. I also dropped in a few Web2.0 technologies with the outcome of the group creating their first blog and ‘delicious’ account...
One of the teachers (Adult Basic Education), immediately recognized the possibilities of using the Web2.0 technologies to communicate with her students. This was exciting and encouraging, I love to see the sparks of imagination fly for the use of Web2.0 technology, such as Flickr, which was used to facilitate photo sharing.
During the day’s Workshop the ideas of how they could validate to incorporate this technology started to flow; 'We can get the students to take pictures of their day, [post to flickr] write about it and present to each other….’ and ‘.. [the] students will find that fun!… as they switch off when I start using the whiteboard’
The day’s workshop was a small step towards encouraging teachers as a way forward to incorporate more interactive teaching and learning tools for pedagogy. I’ll be tracking their progress with Bloglines and RSS.
Satisfaction for me was to walk away with awareness that there is a growing desire of teachers [in TAFE] out there who may not be initially IT savvy, who may have been out of the loop for sometime, despite this they are keen to jump on board with their own personal development to engage with learning new technologies and to discover their workable application in teaching and learning. A win win outcome
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