COETAIL workshop – reflection
last weekend I was in Japan working with the amazing Kim Cofino and her COETAIL (Certificate of educational technology and Information Literacy) cohort.
tweetpic image from @mscofino
The 2 day workshop was Authentic assessment and digital media. We had an underlying them them of developing a unit of work they could use with their students to create a digital media product. We wanted a project or problem based learning approach as this brings together core aspects of twenty first century learning, particularly:
- relevance
- context
- higher order thinking, particularly creativity and evaluation (this was part of the authentic assessment component)
- problem solving
- challenge
- engagement
The projects that were created were all of these, it was a pleasure to see engaged and enthusiastic teachers developing challenges for their students.
One thing we did that was different from many of the other workshops was that we had the teachers develop the media product and preset it, with the unit plan and assessment rubric back to the course. This was a particularly interesting aspect of the weekend. Many times people will create the unit outline and plan, develop the rubric and “guess – timate” how long the product will take to create or the level of complexity of the product. Several teachers reflected that they had revised their product because they could not complete it to a satisfactory standard in the time frame they had indicated for the students.
I wonder how many of us, when developing a PBL based unit or task actually go through and develop the product?
Here is what one participant said
“You can’t truly ‘teach’ a project without going through the process first. Thanks @mscofino and Andrew Churches for a great #aadmc ”
The advantages of actually making the product are obvious. The teacher has:
- experience in the process,
- an exemplar to show the students
- an idea of timing
- a bench mark product to assess against.
I wonder how many of us would have produced and excellent product and how many would have produced a acceptable one?
