Google Sites!
I'm an eLearning Specialist at the University of Alberta now, but little is it known that I worked with Edmonton Public Schools for a couple of years. In that time, I taught English Language Arts and Math to elementary students. One of the coolest projects we had was making posts on a class Google Site together. After learning and practicing key concepts, students had the opportunity to choose a topic that they felt confident in, and they created Google Slide presentations with the goal of teaching the new students for next year the concepts they had learned. These slides were loaded into our class Google Site and the materials were used for the next year, with those students making modifications or creating new slides to add to the collection.
I wish I could say this site still exists. Alas, when I left Edmonton Public, my Google Drive was laid to rest. The materials are in a better place now. Luckily, the students will still have the presentations they made and can upload it to their MyBlueprint portfolio for their K-12 experience.
This is very similar to Domain of One's Own, and the ChemWiki Rajiv spoke to in his presentation. I would highly recommend instructors take these ideas into practice and have students make the OER with you, especially in an accessible, open database that can be viewed by thousands for years to come! That way OER gets out there, you delegate some of the load to the learners, and they have more meaningful learning experiences in your course.
Thank you for your encouragement around students as co-creators, they are capable of so much creativity and excellence! Also a good lesson on archiving over time (with permission from students of course). There will definitely be a trend in the student-led creation and adaptation of OER, there are many more students than educators. When administrators talk about scaling things up, they often refer to technology. My favourite method is peer collaboration among students, you can go fast and far with that.
- Jump to: Parent to post 1
- Permalink to post 2
Awesome! Thanks for sharing. I am also thinking of utilizing Google Sites for a grad course where students will be creating teaching cases. Google Sites first came to my attention last year while teaching the same grad course. Our LMS was failing us big time, huge glitches right in the middle of a big student assignment where they were tasked with creating a lesson page. My students suggested to me that Google Sites would be a lot easier for them in creating the same product. We went for it and the results were amazing! So much better than something private stuck within the LMS!
- Jump to: Parent to post 1
- Permalink to post 3
This sounds interesting. Perhaps I could find a way to use a Google site for students to prepare information for students in the following semester in l my introductory mathematics classes. I really wasn't sure how to reusable assignments in math.
- Jump to: Parent to post 1
- Permalink to post 4