C14 Short term joint staff training event
C14 is scheduled to take place in Athens, Greece from May 6-10 2015. The event will start at 17.00 hours on Wednesday May 6th and finish Sunday May 10th at 13.00 hours. It is described in the project proposal (p59) as "Familiarisation with revised MC resources Year 1 at Edumotiva 2015". The broader context for C14 is explained in the following terms (see the bold highlights): "May-July: The refined MC instrument and online resources for MCxa and MCxb are deployed by Edumotiva, UEF and Edinburgh to the corresponding target groups viz. student computing teachers, young people aged 5-19 and education students respectively, and evaluated. They are also deployed by Warwick with a view to evaluating the relevant claims." There are no specific preplanned workshops for the activities associated with Warwick and Edinburgh, but there is provision in the budget for a 'full' attendance from all the partners (see p73 of the proposal) and it would be good to get representation from as many partners as possible.
Note that in the C14 event we shall be working on a 'participatory design and evaluation' model with computing teachers, rather than simply delivering a course on making construals. Though this may sound like an over-ambitious goal beyond merely 'giving a course', it is in fact intended as an acknowledgement that we have a lot to learn about how to present 'making construals', do not yet have environments and resources that are ideally suited for training purposes, and will have to work in cooperation with the teachers to address these issues. We could re-use/refine resources that we shall use at SciFest and those we used for C5 and the embryonic OOC in preparing for C14. In line with the explanation of the broader context above, we could try to turn our attention towards the evaluation aspect - perhaps it will be possible to find ways to monitor what our learners do more closely for instance - making use of video perhaps, inviting students to work aloud or blog, collating data using the feature that allows us to capture individual interactions and replay them 'as if' live, etc. One general idea that we hope to explore at some stage is a workshop-style activity in which we discuss possible extensions / refinements / specialisations of construals (e.g. to derive OERs), as we have illustrated in the case of the shopping construal - cf. the links on this page: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/research/em/construit/c8-c11/scifest/activities-construals/ - and then proceed to try to implement some of these. We could first brainstorm possible extensions in groups, then look into implementing some of these. Initially, this implementation would probably be best ventured as a classroom activity, where experts in making construals took the lead.
Schedule for C14
Wednesday May 6, 17.00-20.30
- Overview of progress made so far cf. the timetable of activities set out in the project proposal
- Staff training course with project partners (Warwick team is leading)
Thursday May 7, 09.00-14.00
Staff training with a focus on the forthcoming workshop-based seminar with teachers (Warwick team is leading)
Friday May 8, 16.00-21.00 Training course with school teachers
17.00-17.45 introducing the CONSTRUIT! personnel and project
17.45-18.15 Introduction to the ideas underpinning making construals from a pedagogical perspective
18.45-21.00 Session I: Exploring and modifying construals: activities with the Shopping construal.
Saturday May 9, 11.00-15.00 Training course with school teachers
11.00-12.30 Session II : Experiments and activities with construals of a Light Box, Hexagon Colouring and the Game of NIM.
13.00-14.00 Session III : Applying construals to support teaching and learning.
14.00-15.00 Final discussion/evaluation of the experience gained with the teachers, future plans.
[Fuller details of the schedule for the Training Course can be found here.]
Sunday May 10, 09.00-13.00
Discussion about the website (Edumotiva and Warwick), summary of dissemination events that have been organized so far by the partners (all partners), reflections on the current status of the open online course (all partners), Virtual Workshops and evaluation, future steps (Warwick), evaluation of C14 by the partners.
Supplementary notes re Training Course
Suggestion for evaluation tools
- Selected screen capturing (Camstudio?)
- Online questionnaire to be filled in by teachers
- Interviews with selected teachers
