Facilitating Teacher Inquiry: PLG

ICT & personalised learning to improve literacy; is the PLG's official title that I'm facilitating. Thats a lot to digest, as it is probably two PLG's in one. Recently I've gone down more of a Personalised Learning Path in my senior classes as a teacher of Art. This is in response to my students asking "why should I do this?". ICT and Technology is just something I've always been interested in since myself and a friend worked out how to bug a telephone with a Dick Smith Funway into Electronics; FM radio transmitter.

Over the last few weeks Edutopia have shared some very interesting blog posts on Literacy and it's symbiotic relationship with ICT. Reading 2.0 talks about the different types of reading we do in todays world and finishes with a wonderful sentence important to personalised learning "Inquiry leads to research and research leads to reading." I grumpily did reading recovery when I was 8 and was a very slow reader. I read the bare minimum to get me through High School and only read what interested me. Relevance is an important word to remember as a teacher.

A Guidebook for Social Media in the Classroom is a wonderful post about the power of using Social Media in the classroom. It's about understanding our students, how they do things and how to personalise their learning through social media. After sending it to colleagues, I had a wonderful reflective conversation about a "letter to the editor" piece a colleague had wanted to do with his students. I understand the concept but it was very much foreign to his students. He discovered through a class conversation that had he reword it as an "Open letter on Facebook" and his students would have been off.

This post will hopefully start conversations flowing in my PLG session. Something I'd like to do with them is to sign up to twitter, it is the wind that fans the spark of my professional inquiry. I want them to experience Personalised Learning first hand using a little Design Thinking to structure their own inquiry of what interests them about ICT and how it might improve Literacy in our school. With a bit of luck the learning they do will flow into their classroom practice as my inquiry has with me.

Special thanks to Edutopia contributors Mary Beth Hurtz and Vicki Davis plus IDEO Riverdale and the Design Thinking for Educators team.