What happens when teachers work in the holidays.
Sharing what happens when great and diverse minds come together to design learning for kids, everywhere. #ContentCollab
I’ve been building solutions for teachers to personalise learning for years. I’ve been thinking about it for even longer. It’s the thing that keeps me up at night. The stuff I always talk about with friends. It’s the point of my greatest frustration and greatest joy.
It was only a few months back when over a glass of wine I got talking to a friend of mine about how we can get teachers to lean into their innate design capabilities. To design awesome learning quests (what we call them in myEdOnline) and share their amazing work with other educators. My dream is that every student experiences a personalised learning journey, and the role of the teacher shifts from delivery to curation. I know I’m not flying solo in this dream, but I know it’s the stuff of my life’s work.
So my friend and I bounced ideas, and in that very process it hit me. Design, ideas and in fact, being a professional is made all the more impactful when we are collaborating.
And so the Content Collab was born.
I wanted to let you power back up for Term 3 before sharing what we did in the holidays. Because I want you to get on board. That’s my call to action. But first, let me share over the next few posts this week what happened when we brought together 14 awesome educators, and let them design, with only a few values and inputs to guide them.
Who came along and how did they come together?
We decided to invite a range of people who are already myEdOnline users, plus those who we thought would love to hang out together in a day of exploring learning design. We brought in an expert facilitator (and super tweeter) Summer Howarth, and a range of interesting people to run side clinics to support the evolution of the Learning Quest designs over the day. This included Nithya Nagarajan from NIDA, Shai Desai from Learning Plan, and a panel of students. We wanted 12 Victorian educators and ended up with close to 20. Good news travels fast in our profession! (PS, if you’d like an invitation to some of our next events, make sure to get in touch with me daniel@myedonline.com).
What was the brief?
Simple. Find the person who is least like you in the room, decide on your shared meaning of Personalised Learning, Create a persona of a learner and design an experience for them. The only kicker is that the experience needs to be implementable by others… so find a way to share it. myEdOnline is an excellent way to share content and most of our teams decided to build (or committed to building) their experience in the platform.
So what happened?
Twenty educators attended 4 clinics, 5 design spurts over 6 hours. On a Saturday.
Six quests were designed and some even created within myEdOnline. All teams pitched to each other in a celebration of design and process.
Five participants stayed over 2 hours after the event had finished to translate their ideas into action at their schools.
Zero breaks taken, as the adult learning principles of learn what you need to learn, when you need to learn it, came to life. We provided everything needed, from snacks to stationery and awesome space; all in the new Victorian Innovation Hub.
Countless tweets, messages, emails and calls have been made across participants and with our team since.
A true community of collaborators was born.
Why is this cool?
Not only does it again prove the tenacity of professionals in education, as they will choose to work on learning on a Saturday, in their holidays, but it also proves what the research tells us; that when we allow time and space for collaboration, teachers thrive in their practice. There are many other reasons why this is pretty cool, but the shared energy in the room, based on action was something special.
So what next?
I’ll share more of the details of the day with you, but the main thing for us is this; Proof that supporting collaboration works. We’ll be inputting more teacher-created content into myEdOnline across the next few months, and we invite you to get involved too.
Keen to share a learning journey you’ve been working on? Shoot me an email and we can connect you to the growing #ContentCollab Community hosted by myEdOnline. https://www.myedonline.com/ daniel@myedonline.com
