edutechniques.com

Having gained my Masters online with Michigan State University and now having worked with MSU as an online instructor for the past five years I have learned a lot about being an effective online learner and teacher (and I’m still learning so I’m not perfect! ). Just recently I was taking an online course with the IB and found myself on the online learning side of the fence for the first time in a long time (at the same time as teaching my online course with MSU! ). As an Online Teacher As an online teacher you need to look for trends and behaviour in your students and pay close attention to anything that may be inhibiting effective online learning. Without fail, though, every time I teach a course I end up talking more often to one or two students on a more personal professional level as they may have similar interests to me or hold a similar role.

I gave myself and my students two weeks to go through a mini Design Cycle project so that the process and the MYP Design Cycle terminology (and the meaning of the terminology) can sink in and we can all get comfortable with MYP Design. For new students, returning students, and ESL students this started off with doing the following in order: For a lot of our new students at our school and new students to English this was a moment where they actually started to understand what on earth Finally, I got them to make their own Google Slides presentation of the mini design project by adding their own images/evidence for each stage of the Design Cycle.

We decided that we would get each Grade 4 class to create a sculpture or piece of art to brighten up our campus grounds repurposing the musical instruments. We wanted each student to come up their own unique idea, present it to the class with why and how they chose their design idea, and then the class would vote on the best idea. The winning votes were for wind chimes, a new bell system, and a model of the solar system. So after a few weeks of creating the final products were revealed and the wind chimes are chiming, the bell replacement system is clanging (sometimes), and the solar system model is educating our guests and fellow students.

I started off our design thinking exploration this school year with a Grade 2-8 introductory lesson. It was a little bit of a stretch to incorporate the “Empathy” stage of design thinking but imagining the poor life of a tennis ball got the students laughing and making sure the tennis ball could rest easy on their tower. those stages were definitely present (albeit fleetingly) but with larger projects (we are currently in a one month project with Grade 4) there is more time for students to figure out why and how these redesigns are taking place. With our Grade 4 project, which I will write about when complete, we wanted our students to create outside sculptures for our school.