Teaching an #OS4GPD online summer course with @DonBuckley: “Intentional Curriculum Design and Design Thinking”

Above is an interview with me, Don Buckley, and Susan Booth (@SusanMBooth), Director of Professional Growth and Learning at Online School for Girls (@OS4G). Susan invited Don Buckley and me to teach an online professional development course this summer entitled Intentional Curriculum Design and Design Thinking, and this video interview is an introduction to the class. It makes for 10-minutes of fodder if you ever want to make fun of my facial expressions and frenetic hand gestures.

I’ve given presentations online, and they ranged from less awkward to more awkward. However, neither Don nor I have ever led a true online course. It’s been a challenge to transfer/translate that which we’d normally present or discuss in person to an asynchronous digital environment. The class is powered by Haiku, and I’ve gotten pretty good at learning the interface, organizing pages, creating various content blocks, and altering the page layout. I’ve never worked in a school that employed a content management system, so it’s been a pretty interesting experience to navigate the online learning environment.

For the class, we’ll be using shared boards on Pinterest to gather student work and an edmodo group as a place to prototype full-class and smaller-cohort discussions. Also, people will be tweeting with the hashtag #OS4GPD.

I love collaborating with Don. He is one of the smartest and most interesting people I’ve ever met, and I’m lucky to have had the last seven years with him as my boss, mentor, and friend. His next adventure is a non-profit he started, Tools at Schools, to bring Design Thinking to education. You should listen to his TEDxNYED talk below:

Embedding a @Vocaroo recording into @Edmodo post

Maybe I’m tardy to the party, but I just realized how easy it is to record audio on Vocaroo and embed that recording into an Edmodo post. The possibilities are pretty endless: audio book reviews, homework instructions, foreign language classes, music classes, poetry shares, etc.

Vocaroo has a ridiculously simple interface which opens up to a recording window. After recording or uploading a sound file, Vocaroo offers you a URL, embed code, sharing options, and download options:

Then, in Edmodo, you write a new post, choose the LINK button, and paste the embed code in the space provided:

This yields a pretty nice way to share audio posts with a class:

Comparison chart of @facebook @edmodo @schoology from @InnovativeEdu

Lisa Nielsen (@InnovativeEdu) wrote a great post for Tech & Learning (@techlearning) charting the differences between Facebook, Edmodo, and Schoology so schools can be better informed about choosing a platform or platforms for learning and collaborating. Also, the best way to recognize their benefits and/or limitations is to just try them out…

The full article is here, but I pasted Lisa’s comparison chart below:

My slides from “Collaborating with New Media and New Literacies”

From 1:00 – 2:15pm, I’m presenting Collaborating with New Media and New Literacies at the Pacific Northwest Association of Independent School (PNAIS) Fall Educators Conference.

Here are my slides as I’ll show them:

Here are my slides with notes: