Learning independently at last!

At the beginning of this course, when we were just starting to discuss what qualities distinguish 21rst Century teaching and learning from what has come before, we read an article about learning "peripherally" as part of a "community of learners", where you can begin to learn the skills and norms of particular sites / groups / etc. and contribute "real" things even before becoming an "expert". (Here's a link to the notes and responses that I wrote about that article at the time.) At the time, I found these ideas interesting but didn't really "get" them emotionally.

As the course went on, at times I felt very frustrated about the amount of time that it was taking to begin to learn the various tools we were being introduced to. At one particularly low point for me mid-way through this course, I had reached such a level of frustration that I wasn't even really seeing what was on the pages in front of me, any more! At the next class session we did that inner circle / outer circle activity where we were sharing ideas for our projects, and while talking with Patrick I asked him how to add a new page to a wiki. (This turns out to be trivially easy to do, but like I said, I had become so frustrated by then that I'd really lost sight of any sense that I could figure such things out on my own!)

That one bit of assistance was enough to get me going again, though, and since then my confidence has just grown and grown as I've used my class wiki for several "real", meaningful projects with my class (especially our Marionette Myths projects and our Reader's Choice book), and taught myself the skills I needed along the way in order to do so.

Over the past week, I've been working feverishly to manage a project where my students were writing, editing, and illustrating a "Reader's Choice" book about the 1970's on our class wiki. At the same time, I've been trying to get examples of student work uploaded to other parts of the wiki. I've had to learn lots of new tools (both online tools and software that I hadn't previously even known was on our home computer) in order to do this, and I've done so entirely by experimenting, looking for buttons (for things like making links) that looked similar to those on other platforms that I now know, and reading online documentation (FAQ's and other Help pages). Unlike when I started this course, I've had no qualms about joining new sites online in order to use these tools. It feels wonderful to be able to gain new online skills so quickly and confidently!

A month or two ago, I was talking with another classmate, Suzanne, as she gave me a ride home from class. That was at another point when I had grown somewhat frustrated with the need to teach myself so many new skills so quickly. Suzanne commented that she thought that learning to do that was a big part of Dennis' goal for participants in this course. It took me a while to come to share her confidence and enthusiasm about this sort of learning, but after the past week or two of working at a sort of crazy pace on a really exciting classroom project (using our class wiki and many new online and software tools to have my students write the Reader's Choice book and fill it with lots of their illustrations, links, embedded pictures, etc.) for a 1970's assembly that my principal organized, I think I finally really "get" it. I've actually found it very exciting to learn this latest batch of new tools and skills so quickly and so independently, and I've loved seeing my students' enthusiastic response to the oppotunities that it opens up, in turn, for them. I finally feel that I both can and will continue to learn and use lots of new web 2.0 tools after this course ends.

Here are some of the tools (both online sites and software) and skills that I've taught myself just in the past two weeks (and mostly in the past week):

www.mind42.com, for my Summary of Personal Learning

www.YouTube.com (Including learning what formats are acceptable for uploading videos, and what software might convert the formats for me, and what glitches to watch out for in that software.)

Windows Movie Maker (which I used on my home computer to convert .AVI files to .wmv format in order to upload them to YouTube)

How to download pictures and videos from my husband's camera to our home computer -- I hadn't even known how to do that, before!

www.Flickr.com, and how to search it for pictures that have a Creative Commons license.

www.wallwisher.com (which I learned about from a k12online talk, recommended to our building Principal last week for a need that he had, and then used with my class yesterday to write poetry together)

www.slideshare.com (For uploading a PowerPoint -- and I also spent time searching online documentation to find out why it would upload my own PowerPoint just fine but not one that one of my students had made -- It turns out that it can't handle the particular types of images that my student used. So then I spent some more time searching for a tool that could handle her images, and I found a couple, but unfortunately they would have been expensive to buy.)

www.XTraNormal.com (OK, that one was a couple of weeks ago.)

www.makebeliefscomix.com

Promethean Planet (for my other course)

www.mathplayground.com (Just a site I found for my math teaching, not really a "tool" -- but very useful!)

www.prezi.com (I ran out of time before managing to complete the little presentation that I had started -- but, at least I know how to use this tool, now.)

(There are probably others, but those are the ones I remember or have written down!)