The time flies by very quickly and so today saw the fourth convergence session.
As usual we met in the Adobe Room, courtesy of IATEFL LT SIG, and after a few minutes spent getting the sound to work we started. The aim of the session was to let the community catch up on the last weeks’ activities, particularly evalaution protocols and prototypes. We discussed some of the initial prototypes created by the participants and hopefully we’ll be able to share them soon here on the TaD website. Personally I was really pleased to explore some of the prototypes – I thought they presented the idea of the activity really well, usually in a clear and visually appealing way. I particularly liked the videos and animations and the slides with the voiceover. I was surprised by the range of tools used by the participants and this is something for me to take away. Karina talked about her activity, which raised an interesting question whether a lesson plan can be a design too. Of course it can and we explored the differences between it and learning designs as activities.
We spent some time talking about the end-of-session housekeeping too as the last week is all about evaluation and reflection. This is aimed not only at evaluating your designs but also the whole session. We’ll soon be sharing a link to an evaluation survey and we are looking forward to hearing what you think 🙂 We also hope to set up a gallery on this website to showcase your work and we’d love to stay in touch to see how the designs work in your classrooms. We’ve got some interesting ideas in the pipeline so please watch the space!
The recording of the session can be accessed here and we also shared a couple of links which may be of use to those of you who are thinking of cascading the idea of learning design to your colleagues. This can be easily done in face-to-face sessions using the following handouts and toolkits:
- Designer’s workbook which accompanies the Design Thinking for Educators toolkit above: http://sites.education.uky.edu/nxgla/files/2014/11/Designers-workbook-download.pdf
- Hands On ICT face-to-face toolkit: http://www.handsonict.eu/the-handson-toolkit/
- Carpe Diem – a team-based approach to learning design (by Gilly Salmon): http://www.gillysalmon.com/carpe-diem.html