Description of the community

The HUJI group as a School of Education at Hebrew University in Israel is engaged with various junior high school and collaboration with many of their teachers. This engagement is focused on implementation of ICT in regular classrooms. All the teachers with whom the HUJI group has joint ventures are highly involved with the design process of the tools at stake.

For KP-Lab, we have established close connection with Ministry of Education in Israel and with their help we have allocated a group of approximately 30 teachers who will be participate in a one-year training that will get them familiar with the tools being developed in KP-Lab. all the teachers in this group have committed to run one or two activities with the tools that would be ready to be operated in a classroom settings. For some of the tools, which are only in process of design and appear only in pre-mature version, these teachers will study carefully the features of the designated tools and would discuss the potential of the use of such tools in classrooms.

Operation of the community

One the objectives of working with teachers is to construct the framework that would allow the teachers to share the pedagogical experiences. The teachers in the Israeli community will be asked to discuss and share their pedagogical experiences with the KP-Lab tools and approaches in a forum which will be dedicated to this purpose.

Activities in the community

Teacher training:

Teachers are participating in the unique teacher training for the assimilation of innovative pedagogical tools and methods in computer integrated teaching.

In frame of this training the teachers are revealed to pedagogical methods of trialogical learning and experience the use of different technological tools: Digalo, Argunaut, Wiki, shared space and MapIt. The teachers are required to implement the tools and methods as part of the curriculum in activities designed by them.

Community of teachers:

In addition to the face-to-face community we are trying to establish a web based community of teachers. We have decided to establish our community on as many participants as possible, in order to get a live community with vivid discussions and activity. To serve the purpose of being relevant to many teachers we design the website to assist teachers in their work. Teachers can gain from the community different things: new tools, lessons, supportive environment etc. These features should be accompanied with a Hebrew, user friendly interface. Hopefully, this will motivate the users to visit the community webpage and maybe to be active in discussions.

The platform that we chose to use for the community is a Wiki based website with three main domains. The first domain is “wiki lesson” where the participants create a shared reserve of materials for class. The participants are asked to contribute lessons which use technological tools for shared learning. Each participant can contribute his ideas, help other participants in the design of lessons and use the materials others have created; the second domain consists of technological tools and settings that encourage shared thinking, argumentation and enquiry based learning; the third domain is the community of teachers who will discuss the materials and the tools in the two other domains, and other ideas of trialogical learning. A branch of that third domain already exists in the website as a page of opinions of teachers about the long strike of teachers we had in Israel in the beginning of the school year.

The aim of this website is to create a surrounding that promotes shared learning. We are trying to design the community from a trialogical point of view and not just to use it to discuss trialogical learning.

Activity

The first stage of initiating the website and recruiting the first users is finished. We now have 14 registered users and about 40 pages of content. The next step is to disseminate the community to a vast population of teachers. For this purpose we wrote a letter that will be delivered to about 4,000 teachers through MAKASH – an organization for the promotion of computerization in education. We also plan to promote the community in different forums and websites that deals with education in Israel.

Updates

In order to encourage the activities in the community we declared a contest between teachers for the best unit of lessons. The winner will get a sponsorship to go to the ESP conference in Spain, where he will present his work. 

To participate in the competition, the participants are required to upload at least three lessons to the website which conclude different characteristics of shared learning such as the use of technological tools for collaboration, group work etc.

At this stage we have 32 registered users in the website. Some of them uploaded lessons in various subjects such as English, math and biology.

You can visit the website at kplab.wiki.co.il