POSTERous Session Epiphany

Just had a posterous epiphany yesterday. We held a poster session, a required piece for our TEFL training program. Our students created posters demonstrating their knowledge on a topic that they had learned in the program. We opened up the session to our department staff, students, interested parties. For two hours our soon-to-be-graduated students talked to mostly strangers about their posters. One colleague of mine asked his students to interview and review each poster and poster presenter. They had two hours, one hour to interview, and then back in class, they would debate on which posters were done well. They had to vote on the three best ones. As these students were leaving, I was chatting with this colleague about what he had planned to do. I offered to take quick snapshots of each poster with my iPad and upload these pictures to our posterous program blog (tefl.posterous.com). He went back to his class and with the classroom projector, showed the snapshots (uploaded to posterous) to his class and they debated. He later said that it worked exceptionally well, that his students were able to discuss more effectively with the visual aid of the snapshots. It took me all of 5 minutes-during the crazy chaos of the poster session- to upload the poster snapshots to our program blog. Minutes later, my colleague (in a different part of campus) was using these snapshots for his class. Amazing, easy, and fast. Thanks Posterous!

The DLP Project

The Digital Learning Portfolio (DLP) will be the place where you will demonstrate your learning accomplishments. It is not for learning only technology things. It is a place to show your learning. Just like the hard copy version of a learning portfolio shows iterations of your various assignments in chronological sequence the DLP displays this same information digitally. 

 

This will be the only thing I will look at when I assign grades to you for this course.

 

The initial elements of the your DLP needed are: 

It all starts with a working microblogging platform (posterous) used as the virtual location of your work. Then, you need a good title, a good subtitle and a profile picture.

 

Tagging Used for Search and Navigation

There is no need to order your pieces in your DLP. Everything will be organized with a clever tagging structure. There needs to be a logical tagging structure that has, at its base, the required tags to facilitate navigation through your DLP. The required tags are: PREP, Storytelling, AD, Resourcing, Real-Time, Rapport, and so on. You can of course create more tags for your own reasons. Hopefully, you will start adding more to your DLP than what is required.

 

Every PCS assignment will have a tag associated with it. This way anyone can search and find any piece of information on your DLP.

 

For example, if you have found something that you think will help you build communication with your students-it could be a quote, something you said on twitter, an article from a publication or website or a picture or movie then post that on your DLP and then ‘tag’ it with the tag: Rapport. In another case, you might have taken notes on something your learned while we were doing our AD (Afternoon Dialogue) in class one day then you would ‘tag’ it with the tag: AD. If you feel that there’s a story you learned or found and want to use it for your PREP assignment then you need to give it two tags: a PREP tag and a Storytelling tag.

 

One of the goals I have for you as a teacher is to start developing good habits of ‘ubiquitous capture’. All this means is that you start to collect and store information that may be used as an answer to a future problem. Creating and contributing to a digital learning portfolio is one way to facilitate this.

 

Keep an eye out for the assignments you will need to post in your DLP. Below are some things already mentioned.

 

 

The other PCS assignments to be included are:

1. a good title

2. a good subtitle

3. a good profile picture

4. An audioclip (MP3) of your E of your PREP. Please make sure it is not longer than 1 or 2 minutes. (tag: PREP)

5. Read and make a comment on two other classmates’ E of PREP audioclip.

6. Post an image that reminds you of home. (tag: Home)

 

 

 

ok...go to it!