Kamehameha Schools Distance Learning (KSDL) Owau

While looking for resources to share with teachers in our upcoming Ka Hua course, I came across this video. Aside from the ever so engaging speech by Sir Ken Robinson on public education, I really enjoyed the visual presentation by RSAnimation. It reminded me of those Commoncraft videos many of us are familiar with. The presentaiton really got me thinking about how we teach and the future of education. Enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&sns=fb

I just read an article that lead me on a path to download some new apps. The author's goal was to find out how language learners use and perceive mobile phones for education. He carried out a small-scale case study with learners of English in Hong Kong. What he discovered was that language learning was occurring through referential tools (translators, dictionaries) as well as social networking tools. This was specifically for English, so I could see how incidental learning was easier since a vast majority of the applications they wanted to use were in English or easier to use English language to communicate. In terms of incidental learning for other languages, I don't believe there's enough out there to make this happen. I was interested to see the kinds of applications they were using and how it may be useful for the types of things we would like to develop. I downloaded the MyWordBook application and really liked how you could add vocabulary words, definition, sentence e...

Here's some blog posts from our friend Seth Godin that relate to project management and customer service. Reinforces the "and, but . .philosophy." Food for thought as we prepare to do more of each: Irrational vs. unreasonable "Customers and team members make irrational requests all the time. That doesn't make them unreasonable. If satisfying their request moves things forward, it's not always worth the effort to teach someone a lesson. Sometimes, it's more effective to just embrace their irrationality. Being right doesn't always have to be the goal." Disaster Tolerance "Not all disasters can be avoided. Not all disasters are fatal. If you accept these two truths, your approach to risk will change. If you build a disaster-tolerant project, you will be more willing to challenge the fates and won't hide out. The disaster-tolerant approach means that you can focus on the upside of risk instead of obsessing about the worst po...

So here's my final post sharing resources we've included in the A`o Kumu Ka Hua course. This course development process is probably where, for the second half of this FY, I did most of my professional development from finding research to creating content to becoming much more familiar with the ADDIE process and even learning some of the new functions of Bb 9.1 (not all of them easy, but definitely a lot easier for instructors to update, revise and create their own content which is great considering our inevitable increase in part-time instructors facilitating our courses). One of the things I wanted to focus on in developing the Ka Hua course was modeling promising online facilitation and development practices and highlighting each time a practice was modeled - kind of like a "teachable moment." I got the idea from helping my husband with his coaching certification online course. Some of the content in the course is a bit outdated, but the format was very interacti...

I recently began subscribing to the Harvard Business Review and have found many interesting and informative articles and videos on a variety of topics including - yes, reorganization. Here's a blog post by Ron Ashkenas that is very relevant for all of us. At first, I thought it would be a negative portrayal of reorganization, but it's actually very practical and, I think, reaffirms what we are all going through, but also highlights the positive steps we've already taken to address the question of "Now what?" Click on the image to go to the blog post.

Kelly Cua actually found this video that I thought would be a good resource for us to review as we transition toward offering more support services and as we look to refine our processes and procedures. The model we currently use in support service projects is the ADDIE model. This video gives a brief overview of both the model and the instructional design process: We provide this video to the Ka Hua course participants because they will also use the ADDIE process to create their Technology Training Modules. Last Ka Hua course posting on Promising Practice Spotlights coming soon . . .

Because teachers in the course will be developing Technology Training Modules to train teachers at their school in the use of a Web 2.0 or other program to enhance student learning, we have them review 21st century teaching. They already have a pretty solid understanding of it from the Ke Kumu course so we provide just a few more. One of them, which I think will make a good debate, is an blog posting by James O`Hagen calling 21st century skills a "Catch - 21." Here's a quote that summons up O`Hagen's argument: "It has been hijacked by several companies and politicians, and has become a catch-all for educators who feel that because they plug something into a wall during their lessons, or add in some Web 2.0 tool (Glogster, Edmodo, Google Apps, Moodle, to name a few) then that constitutes a 21st Century Skills-based lesson. If you subscribe to the mindset of 21st Century Skills, realize these skills are supposed to mean so much more than just technology, but that...