On my way to the Teacher's College this morning, I was caught in a rain shower. It amazes me how much rain can fall while the sun shines! This morning the uniformed students' pace was a little more brisk as they sought shelter from the rain. This made me smile because people typically walk at a leisurely pace here!
The morning session was meant to be about Moodle and to prepare the IT technician had worked the day before setting everything up after the system crashed a few days ago. However, when we got to the room, we did not have internet. It turns out that there was a city-wide outage for an hour or so. Once we gained connection, the page would not load. So the kind gent from IT came to the college campus to repair things and in the meantime, the faulty and I worked through the advanced techniques of PowerPoint.
They busied themselves creating slides with transitions, animations, hyperlinks and embedded YouTube videos. This group is diverse, some already had a supply of material to bring into their presentation while others did not know YouTube had free videos available. As always with tech sessions, I had them doing the work while I facilitated. I encouraged them to create something that they could use and some of them got the hang of it quickly. We discussed the power of something that does not need internet connection to work, given the problems we had in the morning.
After that, we took some time to review some other technology issues. We discussed various 21st Century skills such as respect of copyright, which led into a mini-lesson of Creative Commons and the related symbols. We leap-frogged into the benefits of social bookmarking to organize the tools that we find online. Then most of the participants had to leave, so the remaining few started working on Moodle course essentials.
There are two groups of teachers taking courses at the Teacher's College: in-service and pre-service. The in-service teachers are given one day a week release time to take the necessary classes, but this has proven to be insufficient and they do not finish their education on time. As a response to that, the lecturers are interested in getting course material online for the in-service teachers to access during the week, freeing Friday for intensive work.
The loss of the Moodle server made it so that the lecturers could only practice creating a space for their students, since we were not certain that their work would remain. Although this was discouraging, they persevered to create some content and gained some level of practice with the system.
Tomorrow I sleep in! Resting this weekend will hopefully rejuvenate me because I get the feeling that next week will be more fast-paced with Moodling and Web 2.0 tools.
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Sounds like you are having fun? Will your program have anyone in Dominica during the summer? CTF will have a team at the Convent School doing general teacher training.
ReplyDeleteThere are two components this summer, both are joint initiatives between University of Lethbridge, Dominica State College Bath Estates Campus (Teachers' College) and the Ministry of Education. There are four of my colleagues that are coming here to conduct these sessions. One will be doing work with pre-service teachers (a group of 26 or so individuals) and the others with in-service teachers (over 80 teachers). You will enjoy the time here, too, Gerald!
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