Most SDI students have completed their first presentation and this has helped many focus on exactly what products they hope to produce by the end of the course. Some students have made considerable progress on their projects while others appear to be just getting underway now.
This year's class have had less class time that last year's and it's showing up in less project documentation - as well as fewer teacher presentations. We've decided to run classes on Tuesday afternoons for a while to address this. It already appears to have had an impact because almost 3/4 of the class completed significant documentation last week.
I've shown a few slides from different presentations in this post. This week students will hopefully display these on their own journals.
I decided to try using Elluminateto record a presentation. Students - check your email for the link to week 7's presentation.
Elluminate is really for live online presentations so I wonder if the class would like to try participating in a presentation online one week. That would give the freedom to choose a time so that people could join from campus or from home - remembering that not everyone has broadband at home.
I wonder if people would interact more or less online - because you can use chat and voice.
Student-Directed Inquiry has begun for 2009 and students have some great project ideas - more on that later... I'm team teaching the course this year with Heather Banks and we will also be using the skills of Dirk Koudstaal who I taught with last year.
This year I've been using SMS directly to student mobiles from my desktop - all in one batch - and including a link to a Google Site I set up to provide course info until everyone is registered in Moodle. Having somewhere to save information that doesn't require registration is proving very useful as new students continue to join the class so I may keep using it.
I've decided to keep posting in last year's journal so people can see what's happened before. Over the next few weeks I'll add new pictures and links so that it becomes the 2009 class journal :-)
Yesterday half the class of 25 students met to hear about the course and talk about their project ideas. All the slides, audio and handouts are now on the class Moodle (for students only). I've also uploaded the slides and some video to the web so that it can be shared on this journal.
There probably isn't much point in showing the video - it's better to see clear slides and hear the audio - but I'll add one anyway.
Tomorrow we will meet the second half of the class... and hopefully the IT issues that have prevented students from using email and any Web 2.0 tools on campus will have been resolved.
Some students have started their activity logs using Twitter and as well as following them I've collected everyone together using Twitter100. I hope to see the whole class on Twitter - with regular updates - within a week.. Nudge... Nudge... :-)
It's been great watching project presentations to see so many projects beginning to take off as individuals and teams settle on directions and scopes. Many have commented on how they have cut back on their original ideas or changed direction... and in a couple of cases changed projects entirely.
With so many presentations over several weeks not many people have been able to view them all - and unfortunately not all were recorded. Nevertheless the slideshow on the right shows some material and there are a few video clips below made from some of the presentations.
The Glassbiscuit Development Team set a very high standard when they gave the first project presentation for the year. It was informative and well structured with clear visuals. (I'll edit this post when I can link to some of their content.) Thanks to Zoe on video and camera we will soon be able to see some of the action - and review it for future presentations.
This week we looked at concept mapping - using Cmap - an excellent tool that is easy to use and enables you to share maps online. This map shows where the tool might be used in the SDI course. Boxes in the map can contain a range of resources - such as web links.
One of the resources attached to the above 'Key Questions' box is a very useful Questioning Toolkit. Asking questions is a key part of SDI project work and research.
In other news... many excellent projects are well underway now with some high quality prototypes and products beginning to appear. Even though most projects have a long way to go you can get some sense of the range of work being done by looking at the slide show on the top-right of this page (and here) and the journals further down the right-hand column.
