EdTechTeam Cape Town Summit: iPad Masterclass

What a whirlwind of a day! I am just back from a brilliant masterclass lead by Lindsay Wesner, focusing on an excellent model of student-centered learning. My brain feels exhausted from all of the learning that I did today but I wanted to write up a quick post so that I can collect all of the great ideas I had, heard and shared.

Excited at check-in!

I Wonder Why?

The first area of focus was creating an inquiry hook, a really great question to engage students and get them to wonder why. I've heard of similar frameworks with regards to Genius Hour but I appreciated the added structure that Lindsay added. It is very difficult to come up with a good question! As I work in Junior Primary, I came up with: What makes our world so special? I planned to narrow down the scope of the answers using additional questions in order to structure the inquiry for my younger students, as my aim was to help them learn about the world, continents in particular.

Scaffolded Research

Once we had our question, we had to create a method of scaffolding research for our students. Very often if you send them out to Google unsupervised then they fall into a rabbithole of online content. Similarly to how I use Symbaloo for managing young students on the internet, you can build an interactive slideshow using something like Keynote, Google Slides or MS Powerpoint. Your slideshow can be shared with the student and can be turned into a great place for the student to research while still following your method. Here is the quick sample that I mocked up today in Google Slides. I themed our research step as a top secret spy mission, because why not?


This is an excellent way of using the concept similar to a HyperDoc to enable students to do research in a safe, focused framework.

Demonstrating Our Learning

Later in the day we were asked to be both the teacher and the student. As a teacher, we had to create instructions for our students to do a task that demonstrates the learning they have done in the research phase. As students, we had to actually complete the task. I found this stage the most challenging as I don't often have to complete the the work that I assign! It really helped me reflect and re-evaluate on my teaching practice with regards to the tasks that I set and my expectations. Working as the students can let you find loopholes and snags that you don't antipicate in your assignments. I struggled to choose an app to show my learning, but once I overcame that I had a lot of fun attempting my first ever Tellagami:

There was so much packed into today, I have only chosen a few topics to write about. I really appreciated hearing from real experiences and opinions from authentic teachers. Thanks to Lindsay for steering us and Leigh Morris for faciliating like a boss, as well as Alan and Paul from Digicape. My fellow educators were absolutely fantastic and I look forward to connecting with more people at the next two days of the EdTechTeam Summit!