Building Blocks

Wow, so where to begin?

I haven't updated my blog since… well… since my internship period "officially" ended. Well… the time period ended but the internship did not!

Turns out that the DoE guide was going to be a lot of work. And iEARN wanted me to finish what I'd started… so my internship continued, so to speak. I'll divulge more on that in my next post.

But let me get back to what I was saying previously, just to give a brief update on Project #3: The Getting Started Guide for teachers new to iEARN projects. I'll start with the ending: It's done! You can view it here. (Yay!) In summary:

    •    I aggregated the data from the surveys. I also learned pretty quickly which parts of my survey sucked, and which parts were super-informative. (Note to self: the "Rate the following on a scale of 1-5" types of questions are most difficult to aggregate.)
    •    I created a killer report of all the survey findings, and presented it to Lisa, who was a bit surprised by some of the findings. In particular, that many teachers wanted video and lesson plans to help them as they were getting started in iEARN projects.
    •    After discussing the report with Lisa, I carefully chose content sources for devising a new guide. Basically, I ended up repurposing what iEARN already had, and adding several other sources here and there throughout the guide.
    •    I was disappointed to discover that it just was not going to be possible to create what teachers wanted / needed most: videos and lesson plans to aid them with their understanding of iEARN projects. The reasons we could not do this are wide and varied; suffice it to say it boiled down to time and resources -- isn't that always the case? Not to mention that many teachers in iEARN are accessing content from countries with slow (read: dialup) internet access, and so text always wins over audio or video. However, Lisa assured me that iEARN was aware of the need for more support to teachers in this manner and that the redesign of the Collaboration Center as well as some new resources in online and face-to-face workshop professional development would (hopefully) cover these needs. So, I feel like this is being addressed, despite my desire to have created some dynamic, media-rich resource for the iEARN global page! Ah well… the newcomer can't know or do everything, right?

So, the Getting Started Guide is done. It's not perfect (far from it) but it's a place where teachers who have never done an iEARN project can go to begin, and hopefully the iEARN staff can use this new guide as a building block for future developments.



Image by 10000spoons under this license.