Teacher's manual to the Learning Toolbox

Discussion:

Teemu

I think this could work as a podcast you can listen same time when clicking around the LeMill.

Tarmo

Not a bad idea. Should we get rid of the screen shots and instruct the translators to read their translations out loud? Although I'm not sure how to handle the variable pauses needed as teachers tackle a certain problem. Should we instruct them to pause the playback, or leave a suitably long silence into the recording?

This will become an outline of the teacher's manual. The first section is Meta, and talks about the manual. Then there's a template for a chapter, followed by the actual chapters.

Meta

This section is not part of the manual, but rather a checklist for the writers.

Main goals of the manual:

• Support teachers in their exploration of Toolbox, adding to the skill sets.
• Function as CALIBRATE validation (phase 1) instructions:
  • The chapters should include creation of new, real, resources (content, methods, and tools), and activate the teachers in the community section.
  • The tasks must be real and useful for the teachers in their work (so the goal can't be "use toolbox", but "find new methods for your lessons".
  • After the tutorial, the teachers should have a good understanding of what Toolbox can provide for them, and can answer validation questions and give feedback (on usefulness, problems, usability, etc.)

The manual should not be technical jargon, but rather user-centric, interesting and appealing documentation. Some key aspects (copied from http://tarmo.fi/blog/2006/12/20/thinking-about-the-users/):

• Why would teachers use the Toolbox?
• Visible milestones on the way from novice to master teacher
• Balance the challenge with teachers' current skills to achieve flow. The challenge must be grand enough, but not too difficult.
• Elaborate on what new skills the teachers will gain with each chapter of the manual.
• Use conversational style (use active tense "you").
• Write good stories, not just descriptions of things.
• Use humour and mystery to spice up the stories.

And read this: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/the_best_user_t.html

The manual consists of independent chapters that can be experienced in any order, but a default ordering is provided.

List of skills in default order

Each skill should be written out into a story. (this list still needs a lot of work)

1. Find new methods you can use in your classroom teaching
2. Share good photographs with others
3. Find your colleagues and join a community
4. Find new tools you can use in your classroom teaching
5. Read tips for use to learn more about how various resources can be used
6. Gather everything you need for your lesson plans
7. Write a tip for use for other teachers
8. ...
9. Improve learning resources made by others
10. Get others to improve material made by you

Chapter template

What will you learn in this chapter?

Describe what the teacher will learn and what he should already know.

Subheading 1

Start the chapter. Remember that it's a story. Use a conversational style to engage the reader (talk to the reader). Use screen shots of the system and other images.

Subheading 2

Use as many headings as needed. End the story nicely.

Your new skill

Describe the new skill that the teacher now has, with links to further information (other chapters and resources) and tips on using that skill in practice.

Chapter 1: You're all out of ideas and your pupils are bored

What will you learn in this chapter?

LeMill is not just about learning content - there's also a rich collection of pedagogical methods like games and other techniques that you can use in your own teaching. You're going to enjoy your classes yourself and it's going to be much more interesting for your pupils. If everything goes right, they'll be queueing to get into your classes, and you'll be the great teacher that's the talk of the whole school.

Where's the pedagogy?

Let's start. Open your browser and go to http://lemill.net.

Looking at the LeMill front page it might not be immediately clear where the pedagogy is. Any ideas? Feel free to try a few links to see if you can find it. You can always get back to the front page by clicking on the logo at the top left of the page. (SCREEN SHOT HERE)

Did you find it? It's the "Methods" section. All main sections of LeMill are always shown on the top of the page. The methods section is meant to be a repository for descriptions of various techniques, approaches, games, and other tricks that you can use to enrich your teaching. The repository is growing all the time as teachers are adding their own ideas into it, and you can too, but that'll have to wait for a bit. Now, go to the Methods section if you're not there already.

Collaboration is a good thing, right?

You'll see thumbnails of some methods, and underneath them some links that you can use to browse the repository. But what should we try to look for? You might have some ideas already, but I'm going to be rude and just decide that we need to find a collaborative method. You know, the whole CALIBRATE project is about providing new ways to enhance collaborative learning. And it's all the rage in educational research.

So the task is to find collaborative methods. Any ideas on how to find them? Go ahead and try. (SCREEN SHOT OF METHODS SECTION FRONT PAGE)

Any luck? There's no direct link that says "collaborative methods", so you need to try something else. How about trying some "tags"?

Right, there's a link "tags" in the lower half of the page, with a couple of example tags. These examples are the most commonly used tags for methods. I see "group work" there, which is sort of related to collaboration, but isn't really the same thing. To see all the tags, click on the "tags" link. (SCREEN SHOT OF ACTIVITY TAG CLOUD)

Aha! In this "tag cloud" we see all kinds of interesting things. But let's not wander away from our main task. Click on the "collaboration" tag an let us see what kind of collaborative activities LeMill has. Now, the list you see shows small images of the methods and some descriptive information like the name and the tags.

Now I know for a fact that one extremely good collaborative technique is the "Jigsaw". Locate that from the list of methods, click on it, and read through it. It's a concise recipe for doing a jigsaw group work, which can probably fit into a 1,5 hour lesson slot or can be completed during several lectures. If you want more information on Jigsaw, there should be links for additional resources in the method description.

Before you leave the computer

If you found the Jigsaw method to be interesting, you might want to make it easier to find in the future. Now, you could store it as a bookmark or favourite in your browser, but what I'd actually recommend is that you add it to your own LeMill collection. Why? Because that way also others who might look at your profile will see that you've collected the Jigsaw method, and know that you're interested in collaborative learning techniques. Later on you might even get some advice and tips from other teachers with more experience in collaborative learning, or novice teachers could ask for your advice. Try to add Jigsaw to a collection now, you can always later remove it if you no longer need it. You'll need to create a new collection if you don't already have one. You can call it something like "Interesting methods" if you want.

Your new skill

Hey, congratulations! In just this short time you've learned many essential skills about LeMill that allow you to improve your own teaching. Here's what I think you've learnt:

• Tags are a powerful way of finding resources. From a tag cloud you can easily look for words that you're interested in, and see what's been tagged with those words.
• LeMill contains useful techniques and methods that you can use in your own teaching, to improve student motivation, improve learning results, and to generally have more fun.
• You can add interesting and useful resources into collections for easy retrieval.

Using these skills you can now browse the method repository of LeMill with ease, and find more ideas to try out in your lessons. But this is just the beginning of a great journey! In future chapters you'll learn how to create lesson plans, join communities of like-minded teachers, collaboratively improve learning material with other teachers, and much more. (LINKS TO FURTHER CHAPTERS) My suggestion for now is to spend 10 minutes browsing the methods section and seeing what's there. And then go do something else, sleep well, and return to LeMill tomorrow when your brain has organized your new skills and is ready for more.

Chapter 2: Sharing your knowledge with others

What will you learn in this chapter?

All the resources in LeMill are made by teachers and other individuals. There's no money involved. This means that all the resources are freely usable by anyone, including you. If you use free resources contributed by others, it's good manners to contribute something back. And that's what we'll do now. Sounds exciting? Or scary? Don't worry, we'll start with something simple.

Find a photo or image to share

Plain text is quite boring. What's needed is images to illustrate difficult concepts or just to provide colour. The simplest thing you can share with the community is an image. Do you think you could find an image from your computer that could be used to decorate or illustrate some learning material? It could be a good photograph of an animal, or a photo of some natural landscape. Or maybe some interesting event that you've seen. Even though an image might not be useful in your teaching, it might benefit a teacher of some other subject area. The image could also be a diagram that you've used in your own learning material.

If you don't have anything suitable, then you'll need to find a good image from somewhere else. A good place to start is Flickr (LINK TO FLICKR CC-BY-SA), which contains thousands of photographs that can be legally used by others. Go there and look for an image that you might want to use yourself, and download it to your computer.

Sending an image to LeMill

Finding a proper image was actually the harders part - sharing it in LeMill is very easy. But first you need to log in to LeMill - you can't send any new information to the system if you're anonymous. So log in, or if you don't have an account, register for an account now.

I just had enough time for a coffee break. I assume you're now happily logged in to LeMill with your own user account. Starting from the front page of LeMill, can you find a way to send the image into the system? Try it now.

The first clue is that images are learning content, so you could start looking from the "Content" section. And you possibly noticed that now that you're logged in, there's a bunch of new links on the left side of the screen. These are all the actions that you can do. And there's one action for adding new content into LeMill. (SCREEN SHOT OF ADDING CONTENT FORM)

Once you've decided to add new content, you need to tell LeMill what you're adding. Images, sounds, videos, and actually all media files go into the first category that you see, "Media pieces". So click on that. After that you need to select the file from your computer, give it a good title, a short description, and some tags. Tags are kind of like keywords, describing the resource. To write good tags, think what words you would use to search for this image, and then write those words as the image's tags.

(SCREEN SHOT OF LICENSE THINGY) Notice that at the bottom of the edit form you're asked whether you own this image or not. If it's made by someone else, then click there and add the name of the owner.

OK, once the form is filled up properly, you're done! The image is now in LeMill and can be found from the searches and tag clouds, just like any other resource. Maybe someone will use your image in some learning material that he's working on. Who knows?

Your new skill

Whew! There was a lot of new things in this session:

• You now have a user account to LeMill. This is great, because to participate in a collaborative community, you need to have a name and a face.
• It's polite to contribute something back to the community that has provided something useful to you.
• You've started thinking of your existing images and other resources in terms of utilizing them in someone else's learning materials.
• You've sent your first contribution into LeMill. It's a small, but important step.

Congratulations! You've just turned from a passive consumer into a modern "prosumer", or "producer-consumer". Another term used is "proam", "professional amateurs". Proams and prosumers are people who produce high quality material and share it with their communities. Sharing with the community does not bring you more money directly, but it does bring you fame and credibility. Many paid professionals have been originally recruited because their impressive contributions to open communities such as LeMill. Think of LeMill as a sort of portfolio, that displays some of your expertise. Book publishers, educational institutes and others may well recruit outstanding members of the LeMill community, maybe even you.

Chapter 3: Find your colleagues

What will you learn in this chapter?

Hello again! I assume you've already checked out some previous chapters so you have some idea of what you can do in LeMill and you have a user account. Now it's time to find your colleagues in LeMill.

Browse the community

Starting from the front page of LeMill, you should log in with your account. Then try to find the Community from LeMill. Again, it might not be immediately obvious where to find it, but by looking for the word "Community" you should be able to get there.

(SCREEN SHOT OF COMMUNITY FRONT PAGE)

Here we are! And if you look at the location field of your browser, which contains the web address (or URL), you'll see that the address is quite easy to remember: http://lemill.net/community/. This is one of the design principles of LeMill - all URLs should be easy to use and understand. If you send a URL to a colleague or to your students, they'll immediately see from the URL itself what they will find.

OK, as you see there are both people and groups in the community. Take a minute to just click on people's faces and see who they are and what they've been doing in LeMill. For each person there's a portfolio listing the resources they've worked on. Don't hesitate to click on the various links to see what they lead you to - you can always use the Back button of your browser to return here. You can't break anything by accident, so go ahead!

Find your own group

After some wandering around it's time to reach our goal. As you may know, there are several teachers from several countries participating in the CALIBRATE project validation, and you're one of them. There's already a group for all validation teachers, and individual groups for each nationality. So the task for you now is to find both of these groups and join them. So you need to find a group that is meant for all CALIBRATE teachers, and then a group for your own country's CALIBRATE teachers. There's several ways of searching and browsing the groups, so go ahead and try to find the groups. Don't read further unless you can't find them without help.

Some tips for locating your groups: Try browsing "by name cloud" - it will list all groups in alphabetical order. Or "by tags", and look for the tag "CALIBRATE". Or "by language" and look for your own language. Once you've found the correct group, click on the Join button on the left to join the group.

Get to know your community

Now that you're member of the two groups, spend some time browsing the groups to see what's going on there. As you can see, there's a forum where you can talk with each other. You can also look at the portfolios of other members and see who they are and what they've been doing. And there's contact information in case you want to e-mail or phone someone to discuss something in more detail. Feel free to look at the discussions in the forums and reply to any topics, or create a new topic if you want to discuss something else.

Your new skill

You know what? You're not alone! Now that you've joined your colleagues in the two groups, you can more easily collaborate. You now can:

• Ask for help in the group forums if you have a problem using LeMill
• Discuss with your colleagues on how to use the resources you've found in LeMill.
• Browse the community in general and find other groups to join.

It's probably a good idea to check up on your groups every now and then to see what they've been discussing. If you use an RSS reader to follow news feeds, you can also subscribe to the group forums so you'll see immediately if something interesting starts happening.