Module 4

Technology-related best practices for all students and teachers (January 25-January 31, 2016)

Course Objectives:

1. Model and promote strategies for achieving equitable access to digital tools and resources and technology-related best practices for all students and teachers (ISTE 5a)

Module Objectives:

1. Read and reflect on the topics of collective intelligence and personal learning environments.  
2. Contribute to and evaluate a piece of collective intelligence.  

1) As the Internet connects more and more people, there are new ways to learn and create knowledge than there were without it.  One of these is the notion of collective intelligence, or the idea that the what we know together is greater than what we all know individually or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  And the process of contributing to this whole is a valuable way to learn while collaborating, a 21st century skill. The problem is that formal education focuses on the individual and makes collaborating a hurdle when trying to assign individual grades, for example.  Read and take notes on these articles for your reflective post this week.

• Collective Intelligence: What it could mean for education
• How collective intelligence redefines education (on Blackboard under Documents)

2) On the other hand, personal learning environments are how individuals can organize the gobs of information available on the web into a more manageable environment.  This blog and the blogs that you have created for this course could be considered personal learning environments.  Together, however, they could be considered a personal learning network or, perhaps, a piece of collective intelligence.  As you read this article and watch this video, take notes and reflect on how personal learning environments could play a role in K-12 education.

• 7 things you should know about Personal Learning Environments
• An example of a PLE by a 7th grade student 

3) Write your reflective post on the articles/video from this week.  You should have 4 summary paragraphs and at least 1 reflection paragraph.  Feel free to include images, links and videos as you see fit.

4) For our activity this week, we are going to create a piece of collective intelligence using Google Drive.  I've created a document that can be accessed by clicking here.  Anyone with this link is able to see and edit this page, but let me know if you have issues.  I picked a very broad topic for us to work on together, defining education.  I would like each of you to pick a time and visit this page each day from Monday through Friday this week.  Pick any time you like, say 8am (I recommend setting an alarm on your phone to remind you), visit the site and add a few sentences, a link, an example, a video an image, or anything that helps to define education.  Feel free to delete portions of others' text!  This is part of creating collective intelligence, adding and deleting thoughtfully.  At the end of the week, read the finished product and create a new blog post describing your experience creating a piece of collective intelligence.  Reflect on how something like this could (or could not) be used in your classroom and make connections to the readings.