How quickly this time went, this workshop represents the last stop on my ISS Institute circuit. It was also the most distant travel.
Sigh, this is back blogging, I loathe loathe loathe back blogging– this is from the workshop done November 22, 2017.
I should have known better, back from my 2000 visit to Albury New South Wales, I should have remembered that Wodonga was the city on victoria just south of the Murray River that forms the border between the two states.
As it was, this workshop was originally planned for two days before; it was not until talking to Brad Beach on my arrival that I was reminded it was that far away. Moreover, my plans were already that I was going to travel to Albury by train after my last session to meet up with Tim Klapdor ar Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga.
Fortunately, the Wodonga TAFE planners and the ISS Institute staff were able to shift the workshop to Wednesday, saving a long round trip. As it was, I was driven to Wodonga by Lisa, enjoying some parallal experience in educational technology while also enjoying how the scenery unfolds leaving the Melbourne metropolitan area.
The brief for this session included:
TAFE teachers who use technology in their everyday teaching, using Moodle as the LMS to engage, interact and assess current students
A hands-on workshop of showing what can be done, what’s current, what’s changing – and how teachers can use technology/websites for teaching. Show some examples of tools and resources and how it can be implement implemented for teaching and learning. Current and Future trends/issues/challenges of technology and teaching/learning.
My preparation for this was some collection, re-arranging, and augmenting of some of the materials in my previous sessions (Wodonga benefits from getting the refined versions).
This works well in the web site structure I set up, where each “workshop” is organized by sections in a WordPress site using my WP-Big Picture theme, so in this case I used as a base the Show Your Work! one. But in there, I can create a custom page that has a slightly different set of materials, picked just for this workshop:
I started with another round of using AnswerGarden to ask their expectations of the workshop; I like to think it provides me some info but also generates to the audience some ideas how they might use this simple too (with me pointing out that AnswerGarden is (a) free; (b) single purpose; (c) requires no login or user data
Yes, they wanted some fun, tool ideas, activities, and food (e.g. ice cream and scones). This alone gives me a sense of the personality int he room, though it was obvious when we started it was an energetic group. But if we were all online, I might not get this “read” on the group directly, but perhaps an AnswerGarden can help.
Although the topic of future of technologies was in their brief, the room was nearly all practitioning teachers, so I only briefly touched on some of the topics in the On Futuring session
The real activity started with pulling out my bag full of odd objects and asking the participants to do the first activity of Identifying Contextless objects.
This is a two part activity meant to get out the difference between trying to “find the answer” vs sharing your process of finding the answer. They are asked to use anything they have at their disposal to learn about the object, or where it’s from.
The electronics/circuit board parts are easy picks, as is the turquoise metal armed thing (a cheap laptop stand). I was pleased a few more people went for the pages ripped out of old cookbooks.
And more people chose the odd CD and vinyl (which are not that hard to research) and we invariably hear some music playing. One person chose the Tijuana Brass album, not the original Herb Albert, but this led to an association I had to share of the article on the Whipped Cream model who is now 76 and living in the Seattle area
They all took photos of their object and uploaded them to the Image Collector SPLOT, I tagged all the ones from this workshop to pool them together:
Perhaps my favorite example was the person who had a picture card of a boat where you could read the name “Marion” on it:
Because this person is an outdoor educator and has some prior knowledge, by adding the keywords “steam” “paddle” “boat” he found an identifying site for the boat www.psmarion.com/about-ps-marion/
I talke through the part of this workshop that expanded this activity, the idea of “showing your work”, and how we could have done the second part of the activity, to create an audio narrated video describing the process. 
I also got to share the work of my Maricopa colleague Sian Proctor on how she has been having her students to web screencasts as a way of explaining and showing their understanding. There was plenty of note scribbling going on here.
The rest of the workshop time was the participants exploring my collection of Silly/Useful Web Tricks
I began with the group doing an group improv round of pechaflickr – And I am totally blanking on the tag we used! Sigh, that’s why back blogging stinks.
This active group was an ideal way to end my series of workshops.
Featured Image: Sharing the Process of Contextless Object flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
