Interaction with the Professions Example

Strategies Used

• Choice Within Assessments - Allowing students to draw on their own discipline knowledge experiences in their assessments.
• Choice Within Assessments.html - Allowing students to develop skills and practices used in their professional practice.

Motivation

The focus of Assignment 1 in ETL523 was to create an authentic learning module based on a chosen topic to do with digital citizenship in schools. This module was to be extensive and comprehensive enough for creators to use in their own learning environments. It could include content in various media forms, activities and assessments as needed. Assignment 2 asked students to be able to articulate and reflect on the role of an information leader and be able to develop an information policy or set of guidelines that support digital citizenship and digital learning in schools.

Video Explanation

Implementation

Part 1: Group project alignment with professional situation and needs

In small teams of like-minded educators, students had to choose a digital citizenship theme and then create a more specific topic for the focus of the collaborative learning module creation. Coming from different schools, institutions and positions within these the groups dynamics initially required communication and sharing of their professional situation and needs in order to support authentic artefact development. Or in other words, they were challenged to get along so that a relevant learning module was created that everyone could use.

Part 2: Personal topic and choice of tools for digital multimedia artefact creation

In addition to the team learning module creation students had to choose a topic and focus for their personal digital multimedia artefact. This ideally was done in conjunction with the team as each artefact had to be embedded into the wiki and support learning within the theme/topic in a meaningful way. The artefact could be static or interactive as long as it was online somewhere and accessible via the module. Each student could choose the tool(s) used to build this artefact which prompted much interaction and discussion amongst teams and between teams as to what tools were current, accessible, easily learned and preferably freely available online. A range of tools was used across the 50+ student assignments submitted in 201630, including PowToons, YouTube, Padlet and more.

Part 3: Environmental scan - information leadership in the workplace

The final assignment for this subject challenged students to do an environmental scan of their workplace. A scenario was established in the assignment outline whereby the school principal/institution leader has asked the student to prepare an overview of the issues facing the school as it prepares to set in place the necessary policy and procedures to establish a digital learning environment (DLE) to accommodate 21st Century learning. The scenario was that the school/institution has nothing or very little in place therefore this report was meant to provide a discussion paper and the starting point of a major, ongoing document that would be revisited, reviewed and added to over time.

Part 4: Modeling best practice identification of issues and discussion of strategies and solutions

Students were tasked with identifying (choosing) issues they wanted to include in the environmental scan/report based on the real situation in their school/institution. Multiple information and/or digital learning issues were discussed in the report. In addition students chose ONE main issue for a more comprehensive and analytical discussion, once again based on their professional learning situation.

Words of advice for wider implementation

Best student examples showed a determination to interview, survey and discuss digital learning and associated issues within the school/institution. This was done in order to gather data that could be melded with current literature to provide a combined researched real-world discussion. Some students were currently not working or in a position to easily gather current data, and these then based their hypothetical report on the literature and wider reading instead. The assignment scenario suggested the report be distributed to leadership within the school/institution, thereby propelling this task into a professional realm. In effect it prevented students from being too critical of what they saw (and were experiencing) and encouraged them to provide facts, observations and then synthesised discussion and some solutions via a proposed plan of improvement.