Further instructions when you get to there is to just write the first paragraph. So now I will begin, but not complete, a thinkpiece about something I am not expert in. Ds106 is all about the moxy.
Scrabble needs its professionals. Not to work for it in spreading the popularity of the game or anything. We need them to stand vigil in defence of the rest of us against the evil forces that the game itself exerts on our language. You see, Scrabble has created a false economy that underscores the alphabet. There are subconscious waves at play in one of your cortexes that gives you a smug feeling when you use words in conversation that include the letters J, Z, Q. even F. We subconsciously think that we ‘scored points’ in our discussion because those letters were included. It doesn’t matter that we steered the conversation about weather patterns to include jazz. This is also the reason why quizzing is so rampant in education when there are far better forms of authentic assessment. The following is my five point plan for taking the letters back from Scrabble.
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featured image: “scrabble” flickr photo by sammydavisdog https://flickr.com/photos/25559122@N06/8054926394 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
It’s a bit funny our positions in the Learning Design & Support Team. We love teaching and learning and we are tasked with helping Fleming faculty in their own teaching, but we don’t get to do it all that often any more ourselves. To really teach. So when we get a chance like the Fleming New Faculty Experience, I hope we don’t come across too strongly. We’re just very excited. I think we all started this week excited for the experience and ended it even more so. Y’all were beautiful learners.
Keeping these reflective posts short and sweet will help keep us coming back to write more and readers coming back to read more so I won’t dig to deeply into the week, other than to say thank you to everyone for playing along with us. I really, really enjoy reading your thoughts on how things are going through your blog posts and I hope you will continue to share them. To anyone reading this interested in seeing some of the posts, you can see them listed in the sidebar of the The Teaching Hub, which is a weekly blog post for Fleming College faculty by the Learning Design & Support Team.
Oh and I want to share the results of our “First Presentation Slide of the Semester Beauty Pageant”. Everyone tied for first place. Except Liz Stone’s was more first place than the others.
In first pace: Benjamin Walters for his Forest Management Using GIS opening slide.
Also in first place, Tom Brooke, for his Limnology III opener.
And in first place, Matt Ryan for setting the stage for COMM 201 with tears of… joy?
And finally, in actual real first place, we have Liz Stone’s first slide for Indigenous Perspectives. Looks great, Liz!
I love pretty slides. Thanks for playing along and can’t wait to hear the stories of how your teaching and learning goes throughout the semester.
featured image: “2nd Annual “More than a Beauty Pageant”” flickr photo by UrbanPromise Camden, NJ https://flickr.com/photos/shannonoberg/16260674029 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
We used Kahoot briefly yesterday in the Fleming New Faculty Experience. It’s a quizzing tool that lots of people seem to really enjoy. It was easy to set up, easy to deliver and, I think, quite fun.
The way Kahoot works was involved in making it fun, but here’s what I found the most fun about our “hooting”: the banter.
See, we’re just beginning to build a community or culture of we’re-in-this-togetherness with each other. We threw the “hoot” together to get us to start thinking about what we do know and don’t know about learning outcomes and also to show Kahoot as a possible tool to use in the future. I enjoyed the banter more than the “hooting” itself in that we kept talking throughout about how we may or may not have any clue about the answers to these questions yet. We may not be activating any prior knowledge but instead getting the ball rolling on knowing our first things about the topic at hand. And that is more than okay. I especially enjoyed the banter coming back at me (Mary) about my choice of words in some of the questions and whether or not they made any sense. Talking about the wording drew us more deeply into the topic we were introducing. I’d like to say my poor choice of words was therefore planned, but I’m grasping at straws here.
But please, keep up the banter. I also really hope my incessant ‘verbing’ of Kahoot sessions as “hooting” will catch on.
Hoot, hoot!
Featured image: “Owl” flickr photo by Matt Biddulph https://flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/4681820992 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
Grab your toothbrush and some toothpaste. A flannel for your face. Say to your reflection, “Let’s get into this place”. It’s time to build a big piece of our community.
Right after many of us have burned our retinas by staring at the solar eclipse, Fleming College New Faculty Experience 2017 members are getting together to make their own WordPress domains in which to grow forth together as college educators.
The reason? why, to give each other a head start! Our journey to the top of pedagogy mountain will now have a gondola that takes us halfway up. And we can climb the rest of the way together. That is what we can do for each other by sharing our thoughts, plans and reflections on our connected WordPress domains. By seeing the posts of each other, we will be tempted to borrow great ideas, adapt them to our own needs and otherwise get better by association.
So why am I sharing these instructions on my own personal domain? One reason is for you to see one of the WordPress sites you are about to make in action. Another reason is that I want you to know my domain and I want to know yours, so we will be familiar with each other’s as we begin to connect and share our ideas and plans. They will all appear together on the sidebar of our weekly Teaching Hub blog post. Fame awaits.
Here’s a quick intro video to WordPress. All I had to do to embed the video in this page was to paste the link to the YouTube into the editing area and it embeds itself. It’s super slick.
Below we have provided a set of instructions for getting set up in WordPress. These instructions, however, were created for COMM 201 students, not us. That means, we also have instructions for the instructions! In other words, amendments. Amendments are great. People are always talking about them in movies and stuff.
So, without further ado, here is a link to the PowerPoint instructions that George Fogarasi created for the COMM 201 students. Click the link to download it and either view them in PowerPoint or print them off for your reference: WordPress Instructions 2017
Once you have those ready, also be ready to tinker a little bit with them through these amendments:
Instructions for the instructions:
These are amendments to the COMM 201 PowerPoint for our needs.
1st amendment– to slide 2 of the PowerPoint: You will not be graded, only judged… positively!
2nd amendment– to slide 5: Ignore ‘do NOT pick another theme’ PICK WHATEVER THEME YOU WANT
3rd amendment– to slide 6: Instead of ‘pick a FAKE name’, Pick an AWESOME name.
4th amendment– to slide 13: Instead of ‘This I Believe’, make the page ‘About This Space’
5th amendment– to slide 17-24: Instead of adding pages called ‘profile and reflection’, DON’T DO THIS PART AT ALL! INSTEAD, ADD A POST (NOT A PAGE) CALLED “LETTER TO MY THIS FRIDAY SELF” or “SOMETHING LIKE THAT” and then go ahead and write that post in which you describe a bit about what you’ve learned and what your initial plans are for using it in your teaching.
6th amendment– slide 30: Menu items won’t be the same. make a menu item for ‘About This Space’ and a category menu item for ‘NFE’ or ‘Reflections’. Don’t be afraid to ask for help with this.
Questions to know the answers to:
What’s the difference between a post and a page?
What’s the difference between the types of menu items?
Have I sent the URL to LDSTeam@flemingcollege.ca?
Is my menu looking goooooooood?
Do I know how to create a post? Find pictures that I can use? Add those pictures? Add links?
Did I just generally play around with adding, editing and formatting things in my posts?
Did I try to embed a YouTube video, just by pasting the URL into my WordPress editor?
Do I know how to get URLs for posts/pages to tweet them out/share them?
Have I ‘tagged’ my posts with #FlemingLDS?
Did I know how to Tweet out my post URL with #FlemingLDS?
featured image: “Fresh Fruit” flickr photo by James Ian L.A. https://flickr.com/photos/jamesherman/3428261662 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
image credit “Tinkering” flickr photo by Timitrius https://flickr.com/photos/nox_noctis_silentium/6156272159 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
Step 5: Doug Pete also chats about this post, with Stephen Hurley, on his radio show of the same name on the VoicEd.ca radio station which chats about education in Canada 24/7. Colour me extra flattered.
Step 6: Stephen Hurley from aforementioned VoicEd.ca has me on his own radio show “In Conversation with Stephen Hurley”. I am now painted a nice, deep red flattered colour.
Step 7: (not yet completed) Stephen Hurley offers me the opportunity to have some time on the station to do a thing… A show? A… what? A weekly chat about Open Education? Sharing student projects? I don’t know yet! What would you do with the air time if you were me? Comment below if you have any brilliant ideas or want to go on air with me at some point.
“Baguettes” flickr photo by SteveR- https://flickr.com/photos/git/200262036 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
