Please find below a YouTube video B Nesbitt created to “inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.”
Paul Fairbrother and I used it at the most recent IBNA conference in San Francisco. It went down very well with school leadership who told us they will show it to their teaching faculty as soon as the new school year begins.
We knew it would only be a matter of time before the IB learning community began to inhabit media sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Here are two examples we’ve come across recently - both from YouTube.
The first is a PYP exhibition sample, contributed by students and teachers at the International School of Tianjin, China.
The second example is from a TOK student in the Diploma Programme. We don’t know who he is or where he’s from, as there are no end credits, but we think you’ll enjoy it nevertheless:
With either video, we make no claims as to their adherence to programme requirements. What we do want to do, though, is use them to highlight a number of important issues.
The first is that they’re two examples of students using new technologies to get a message across and show evidence of learning. This is something we will need to come to terms with as a curriculum and assessment authority, and particularly as an awarding body, in the future. Recognising student learning, when evidence of it is so dispersed on the web, will be a real challenge for us in the years ahead.
The second is that they’re both examples of resources which can help teachers in furthering their understanding of the programmes. Discussions around what’s good, and not so good, about them are invaluable for teachers as they attempt to come to terms with programme requirements and continuously improve their practice.
Thirdly, and as a corollary of the above two points, where these examples are located will increasingly be irrelevant. What is important is how we describe them (ie what metadata will we need to establish and use in order to tag these resources?) and how we link to them (ie how can we make use of the semantic web to go beyond a closed teacher resource exchange, such as that on the OCC?)
