Day Five Dominica: Sunshine and Rain

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.

Day Four Dominica: Traversing the Isle

Dominica has the Atlantic Ocean on the East and the Caribbean Sea to the West. The picture is a view of the Atlantic Ocean from library of the North East Comprehensive School in the (you guessed it!) North East of the island. I cannot imagine trying to focus on my studies with that view calling to me.

The day started early so that we could make our way across the small, mountainous island. What a beautiful, green place. Weaving through the tropical rain forest, around the dormant volcanoes is a meandering road that is frighteningly narrow. Currently there is construction to widen these alleys, and this process delayed our arrival somewhat.

At the secondary school I met some fabulous in-service teachers and their students. I am not sure if I mentioned this before, but things here in Dominica are not all that different than the way things are in Canada. Some teachers embrace technology and have figured out how to do things on their own by simply investigating. These teachers are amazing and I feel inadequate trying to help them, since they do not need me at all! Then there are teachers who are unsure of themselves and just need some coaching and encouragement to get rolling. These teachers are great to work with as they are easy to please! There are also some teachers who are reluctant to change. These can be the most difficult to work with, but if you find that one thing that works for them, the thing that makes the job easier for them, then you just have to get out of the way!

I met teachers just like this today. One is a teacher who already knows much of what I was prepared to share with her, another just needed to be told to go ahead and try what she was thinking of doing who was impressed with some simple tips and another who was comfortable staying on the well-tread path. Today I did not find that one thing to inspire this teacher, but I did find out more about Dominican life.

Students are the same everywhere, too. The ones who sit at the back of the class, the ones who sit up front and try to answer every question, and the one who just hopes not to be noticed by the teacher or peers - these students are in every classroom around the world. Where the tomfoolery of the boys at the back of the class made me smile, my heart went out to the in-service teacher who was being officially observed by a faculty member while a stranger from Canada also sat in on her class. She did marvelously well under that pressure.

Finally, I have to mention the generosity of my hosts. I was a passenger for this trip, and they took me through the Carib Territory to see a traditional village. This made the trip all that much longer for them and I appreciate it greatly. In fact they even insisted on buying lunch and even gave me a lovely hand-woven basket to put my trinkets in. Honestly, what delightful company. What a fabulous place to live! I might have to check out the prices of houses; do you think anyone would hire me?

Day Three in Dominica ... Technical Difficulties

The morning of Moodling was postponed due to technical difficulties; the Dominica State College's website is down. This hampered the plan to create quizzes and investigate the different ways to deliver material. Instead, two of the lecturers and I compared learning management systems. They use Orbund, more of a student information system. I showed them how the set up in Orbund compared to the set up in Moodle (with gradebook). This investigation led to another discussion about assessments, the value of knowledge and the extent one reflects the other.

Another lecturer, she tells me she is semi-retired, is eager to learn new ways to deliver her material. This experienced educator has traveled the world learning about education, a true life-long learner. Although she expressed concerns about not having the technology available when she needed it, and some reluctance to be dependent on technology, she was certainly interested in supplementing her lectures. Since she was another one who had recently adopted presenting with PowerPoint, we started with the various enhancements available in the software. From the discussion of embedding videos, we went on a mission to find YouTube videos for her. This in turn led to a mini-lesson on search techniques. The material was packed up and sent to her in an email (another address captured!)

Teachers at the Dominica State College are either in-service (already working as teachers and taking courses part-time) or pre-service (just out of secondary school). Until recently, secondary students could start teaching right out of high school at the age of 16 or 17. Even with the new system, teachers can be as young as 18 or 19 years old!

Tomorrow I am going along on an observation of a in-service teacher. I will be learning even more about the Dominican education system!

Day Two Dominica: The Answer is ...

This predominantly rainy day started at the college at 8:00 am. While the Dean was busy, we walked over to the private school right next to the teacher's college. There an American expatriate is principal. This was a surprise visit (do you see a pattern?), but we were welcomed and showed about the place graciously. One particular teacher was eager to discuss her situation with us; her tour and chat illuminated Dominican education for me. I will tell you a little more about this intriguing woman in a later post.

The rest of the morning, and into the afternoon, was spent helping two lecturers (not teachers, not professors, those who educate teachers at this college are lecturers) bring technology into their courses. Both self-professed a technology deficiency, but I found no such thing.

The first lecturer expressed an interest in improving how she demonstrates corrections to paragraphs. Currently, she is writing on the chalk board, making changes in different colors of chalk and losing her class' interest. I suggest using a Google Doc that she invite her students to. Since she had material from a student in an email, she simply copied and pasted it into her new document. She bookmarked and emailed it to herself, so she has easy access from two spots! I have tucked away social bookmarking for discussion later. She literally stared at the computer for a while, grinning, and I believe she was planning ways to tap all the wonders that exist in Google. The Dean commented on her obvious pleasure and she just could not believe how easy this could be. Technology challenged no more!

The second lecturer had a simpler task for me. She wanted to create something more interactive than the PowerPoint presentations she has been delivering to her class of in-service teachers. We settled on a Powerpoint Jeopardy game as this productivity tool was familiar to her. For those of you who have not done this, it involves linking slides from questions to answers and back to the game page. Time consuming in some respects, but gaming is engaging! The pictures that head this post show one question, answer and the student's response to getting it right. The in-service teachers learned something about Martinique's history (in French) and how they can use Microsoft productivity tools in their classes. They expressed interest immediately following the lesson. I thought it a success!

Day Two ended around 4 pm, without a lunch break at all. Thankfully, the Dean shared a mango with me - it was delicious! Day three is booked with Moodle sessions and more meetings. I am starting to hit my stride!

Day One in Dominica

I arrived in Dominica Sunday March 27th, 2011 and found a beautiful island with regular rainfall and high temperatures. The next two weeks will be spent working with the faculty of education at Dominica State College. Although they have given me very little in the way of direction, I think we will be working together building our understanding of role of technology in education.

To this end, I have planned ten days of reviewing the TPACK model, in order to ensure that the technology we discuss will be used purposefully. Also on the slate is Digital Citizenship - something I believe teachers in Alberta (including myself) started focusing on a little too late.

The first day did not go as I thought. I met some of the faculty, including the Dean of Education, as well as the President of the College. These meetings were beneficially informative for me, but I caught a whiff of impromptu in each one. None seemed prepared for my visit and I may have given a similar impression by replying "What would you like to do?" when asked "What are you going teach me?". This was not what I expected.

Furthermore, it became obvious that I would not ever meet with the group as a whole, instead I will spend a few hours with each faculty member discussing what he or she might like to learn and then attempt to accomplish some progress before he or she gets back to preparing for class. Slightly disappointing. Tomorrow I meet with the Dean of another faculty and will be offering my services there, too, to make sure my time here is spent well. I do not expect to use anything I have prepared.

On the positive side, for my first day, I did introduce one person (who may have been pressed into entertaining me) to the cloud computing tools in Microsoft Live accessible through her Hotmail account and another to social bookmarking. Neither were aware that these tools were even there! Not bad for brief meetings.

Wednesday I will work some Moodle magic with two faculty members and Thursday will be spent observing a student-teacher in action. This vignette of Dominica education will be invaluable for me!

What will Day Two hold?