Wednesday 3 June 2009

Online Learning Project

Last night saw the launch of our collaborative online learning project here at Kellett. This exciting new venture involves Yew Chung and Chinese International Schools working with ourselves to investigate student use of online learning spaces.

The basic outline of the project is that older, experienced users of the programming language Scratch mentor younger users from a different school in the use of the software. Their communications will be entirely online in our purpose built learning environment and will be outside of school time.

As teachers, we are increasingly aware of how the dynamics of education are constantly shifting and how students have access to a huge community of learners and 'teachers' outside of school. We hope that this project will give us an insight into how this community can be used to enhance the learning of our students.

The project is likely to begin next week on the completion of our online environment and students will be involved for around eight months. At various points we will be updating parents about the progress we are making and expect to feed back to the wider education community in the new academic year, most notably at the Hong Kong 21st Century Learning Conference in September.

We are also grateful for the involvement of LEAD who will be evaluating our results when the project is completed.
Below is a copy of the presentation given last night.


1 comment:

Unknown said...

Sounds exciting - will be looking forward to updates as you venture along.
Mentoring sounds like a great idea - I've tried Scratch with my class but we seemed to be just sharing our ignorance - we weren't able to make the leap from "great" to "WOW look what i've done!". Being able to call on help from others interested and accomplished would have been ideal.
Good luck and have fun :-)

KimP