Beyond The Classroom [Module 2]

One of the 2nd modules assignments was to make up at least one idea for content, which could be created with students and would have a wider purpose or meaning. Immediately some questions pop up into my mind: Purpose for what and for whom? What kind of meaning? Should this content have wider purpose in students’ lives or wider meaning in society perhaps?

I got few suggestions here. One is idea which we could implement on my entrepreneurship course. Previously on this course we have planned and produced some marketing events with local enterprises. We could do this kind of project and create a blog or social media site - for instance in Facebook - on which we could advertise this event. This site or blog could be shared through social media and this would serve learning goals and have a wider purpose as well. This site should include pictures, videos, stories and links to sites of the interest groups involved.

Another idea was writing and creating a critique of a museum exhibition. Sometimes we visit museums on my optional history courses and students could write about exhibition as part of course performance. And again the critique could include photos and videos along with text and it should be implemented in the way that it can be read in the Internet.

Content Created with iPad: Morfo & Puppet Pals [module 2]

The first video is an instruction video to my students and I have described there, how to use Morfo application. The second one is a student work about Cuban Crisis made with Puppet Pals app. It includes interviews of Fidel Castro, JFK and First Secretary Khrushchev. Both videos are in Finnish, unfortunately.

Content Created with Tablet: Google Sheet & Timeline JS [module 2]

Timeline JS is very handy tool for creating timelines. I teach history and for my purposes making a timeline suits very well. Right below you can see a timeline made by my student. She made it with iPad on a course called World Cultures and it describes the interaction between Europeans and other cultures from Early Modern period forward. The following is a Finnish history timeline, which I made myself for a Finnish history course. Unfortunately both are in Finnish, but I hope you can see the structure of this kind of timeline from these examples.

If you wish to make this kind of timeline, you need to make a spreadsheet with Google Sheets and then publish it with Timeline JS. You can find instructions from Timeline JS webpage.

The Learning Scenarios [Module 2.1]

I understood learning scenario as a certain kind of model, which you can apply on different subjects and age groups. It´s a sort of pedagogical pattern which one can reshape in order to make it fit in one’s own purposes. My own scenarios are not so sophisticated as the model introduced in the video, but those basically include the same phrases

My typical scenario includes some sort of warm up or general discussion about subject (dreaming) and then students have to do some output which they will share to each other (phases explore, map, make and show). For example students will produce a mind map and post it to Moodle forum and then they can comment each other’s works. While students are creating the output - for instance mentioned mind map - I usually observe and conduct the students’ work. So there is a kind of “ask” and “remake” phases included as well.