Well, it's been a while since my last
posting so I thought it
was about time I put up some of my photos from my trip to Montreal.
On the day after the conference ended, the weather was fine & I was able to walk down to the St Lawrence River & see blue sky & flowing water.
The first photo shows an interesting variation on the average inner-city habitation boxes.
The second is a building old-style Montreal. The clock stayed at 10.30 the whole time I was there! Below is a fountain in the airport in Vancouver. I thought is captured beautifully the relationship beteen the city and the water around it - the bay & the islands.
Here I am back in Brisbane ready to join in the last 2 sessions with my students. The 2 conferences were very interesting and inspiring - & my students' posts on their blogs & the wiki were well received. It was great being able to open up the sites & find so much student activity, with comments being posted on each others' blogs & the Wiki just growing organically into a very student-shaped community. Great to see!!
Something I have found most exciting is the way my students have just taken the tools and used the spaces to make them their own. And such a sense of community - with support, suggestions, tips - very sharing rather than competitive, which was one of my (hidden) aims in the changes I made to the design of the course.
Something else that came out of the focus group discussions was that they would like deadlines for assignments. This was one aspect that I was curious about - whether they would take advantage of the flexibility to do some things in a different order - but one did mention that they felt directed to do the Webquest first - probably because that was one of the main items in the second workshop. I'll have to think more about how to do this next time - whether to make hard deadlines, whether to make the assignments in a specific order, whether to leave the timing open, or whether to give them guidelines - perhaps some recommended timelines that will help them get the work done in time, but not compulsory or hard deadlines. I'll see.
I think I'll also post another set of summary reflective questions on the discussion forum about their perceived benefits of the structure of the course, the assessment pieces, the tools & support, as well as the good and bad aspects of the final assignment.
I'll include some of my photos here from the conferences when I have a chance to download & process them. Photoshop will be hard-worked this weekend, I think!
