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Advanced minimally invasive surgery is a fairly new approach to surgery. I currently belong to a forum that members can ask questions, give advice, share their videos, or recommend articles. I find this extremely educational and helpful. It's also comforting to know that there is a place to turn to for answers. You also quickly realize there are many approaches to the same problem and no one really knows which approach is better...(although, some think very strongly that their approach is best). Every week I feel like I'm gathered around the water cooler discussing our various c hallenges, but we're actually from all over the globe.

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In my online Calculus course, I have activities built in that require collaboration between students in different communities. For example, my opening assignment is research on the history of Calculus from the era of Newton/Leibniz. The assignment is jigawed in a way that everybody must come together to share their knowledge before being able to submit. I find this builds a level of trust and shared ownership that is easy to develop in a classroom but difficult in an online course. The students who really buy in to the concept are constantly texting and emailing each other to bounce ideas off of each other. In fact, last year two of my students decided to sync their 1st year university schedules as much as possible after taking my class from two different towns!

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Right now I am working at a private school in Vancouver. We help students from China upgrade with BC curriculum courses so that they can attend Canadian universities. The school is brand new and the result is that my classes have two students each in them. Last year I had 62 students in the Middle East and this year I have four and so it can be a little discouraging. I try to connect the class as much as possible to keep it interesting. We use iPhone apps, edmodo, prezi, youtube, iMovie and anything else I think might improve their learning and get them excited. It is also proving to be a great space to test out new learning technologies that I hear about in this program and to get detailed student feedback. I'm actually thinking of asking them to work at an MOOC course at home next term to help them prepare for college. We have a beautiful facility and only about 15 students in the school. Connected learning is the only way we are able to keep from being utterly isolated!

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I have introduced my middle school resource room students to various google features to help them connect and to share resources. These students had never written emails before and several are now using email regularly (and appropriately) to communicate with their parents and with friends in the community. We have also been using google drive to share documents and to assign activities through google forms. This has been very successful and students have really enjoyed being able to complete their activities and watch as I receive them electronically. Overall, this has been a very successful experience and I hope to continue to find new ways to connect students to the world around them using these kinds of technologies.

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In my Kindergarten class, one group of two students discovered a loophole in my ‘two students per centre’ rule. The group was at the kitchen center, pretending that it was a restaurant kitchen instead of a house kitchen. The two students then went around the classroom inviting their peers to their restaurant and telling them to buy their food. Before I knew what was going on, there were five students at the kitchen center. Of course, I questioned the students about my rule. They told me about what they were doing and they wanted to also invite students from the other Kindergarten class to their restaurant. I was pleasantly shocked and pleased. It was an awesome learning moment for me!

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This year I started a Movie Making option in my school in the hopes of showing students the importance of paying attention to what surround them while incorporating technology. Instead of watching them always look so bored. It took weeks but my students made documentaries, of various topic but the most thought provoking ones and the ones the students loved best, where the documentaries centered around our school, interviewing students and staff on various topics. It was amazing to watch them work together, work in the community, edit and put together their movie and in the end it was SO worth it!

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I'm just starting to delve into the world of continuing medical education. The newest research (take a look at any of the works by David Cook at the Mayo Clinic (http://www.mayo.edu/research/faculty/cook-david-a-m-d/BIO-00027574)) indicates a strong need for learning that is as close to the real world as possible. Oncologists, like all physicians, are super-busy, and need the kind of tailored, but in-time learning that connected learning offers. Simulations and virtual patients were once a novel thing, but they are becoming the standard. And the neat thing is, they don't have to be digital - Cook indicated at a talk I participated in this week of incredibly helpful simulations that can be created using paper cups and drinking straws!

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In a way I see connected learning as real-world project/task-based learning using technology. In EAL and workplace training we use a form of connected learning all the time, although it isn't always with technology as tech access is still early 2000s. One such project is I had my EAL learners find a non-profit agency in the community that would provide a particular service or program that they would find personally relevant. They would then research the project online, phone the organization and talk to someone about the program, create a presentation and then write a paragraph, which they would then post to a webpage. Students always find this project really engaging as it opens their eyes to services within the community that they were previously unaware of, and they get to practice their reading, writing listening and speaking skills, as well as develop website building skills.

For one workplace training activity, I had learners bring up their schedules on their smartphones, access emails in the past week that resulted in changes to their schedules in order to see how much their schedules change, create awareness of how they spend their time and develop techniques on how they can manage it more effectively. As a fun activity, I also had them count how often during the session they check their phone.

Most workplace bridging programs frequently bring in industry professionals to teach, review work, or provide opportunities to network, connecting learning to real-world performance. So in other words, I see a lot of connected learning everyday.

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Over the years I have tried to incorporate different facets of connected learning in my classroom. I was lucky in Canada to have administrators that would encourage me to make the curriculum more pliable to engage the students in the content. One specific example I can remember was PBL unit where we had the students discuss an issue and find a solution that mattered to them. We involved the community, the local municipal government and non-profit environmental groups to come in and work with the students to develop their own answers to a flooding issue that had been prevalent in the low lying part of the city for decades. Everyone was more then willing to share their findings and even follow up with the students via email. They even came in at the completion for a showcase and our Mayor was on hand to witness their work first hand. It was a pretty satisfying project that the students still talk about when I bump into them today.

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Here is a quick clip of what we were able to do with a crew of wonderful Grade 8 kids.

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I've been drowning in the (Power)pool of PowerSchool this year but it has given me the opportunity to connect as a learner. My main source of help comes from my contact through Pearson but also the various user groups (PSUG) and the community within PowerSource. I really dislike the abuse of "Power" but I do enjoy exploring and interacting within the online community who uses the software. I hope to be going to one of the conferences where I'll have a chance to connect with some of these people away from keyboard. I'm interested to see how the experience changes.

My connected learning is hampered in large part by the internet over here. The longer I stay in China, the more disconnected from the world I feel as I forget the Western internet. With so much of life happening on-line, I worry for the students we send to western universities without a western understanding of the virtual world. We try to incorporate connected technologies where we can but the major players are all blocked or access is painful.

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When I participated in my first MOOC, there were over 29,000 participants from every walk of life, with many different cultural and educational backgrounds. The course was designed to provide information that would be useful and interesting to average people rather than academics. There were several people who had previously earned PhDs in the subject and those who were complete beginners. People who spoke languages other than English set up their own online groups to translate and interpret the materials. Those with PhDs took on mentoring roles for others with less experience. Everyone was encouraged to post articles and ask questions of personal interest. The students even submitted suggestions for the topics to be covered in the final week of class.

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A group of middle school students in my class are planning a trip to their former elementary school. They felt that making the transition to middle school was very challenging. These students want to ease the stress and improve the social/emotional health of the grade 6 students. This idea came from the students as they were led through the "Got Health" student led inquiry model in my school district.

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I work in Quebec as a Language Monitor, in a program

funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage. There are 85

Anglophones working as language monitors here in Quebec, and 200 Francophones working in other provinces. Teaching experience, while helpful, is not a pre-requisite to the job. As such, there is a range of backgrounds and a variety of perspectives for successful engagements with students. Our group of monitors stays connected and engaged to each other and to our student populations, concurrently as educators sharing our relative Canadian culture and English language, and as students learning how to bring relevance of our shared, cross-cultural  experiences, our myriad of regional and/or cultural knowledge, and real-world reasons for bilingualism even within the boundaries of our diverse Canadian landscape.

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Voyager * Travailler * Apprendre | Travel * Work * Learn Tu es à la recherche d'une expérience de travail rémunéré en milieu scolaire? Est-ce que l'opportunité de voyager au Canada et de faire connaître ta culture t'intéresse? Participe à Odyssée! --------------------------------- Are you looking for a paid work experience in a school environment?

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It's sometimes too easy to feel isolated from a larger connected world in an elementary. One way that I have worked on was to have parents or other professionals from the community come and present to students. In particular once I was able to have an x-CFL player come to the school and do some phys. ed. with the class. This was great as it was authentic and engaging for the students. Another assignment that students were able to do was to create Scratch animations, and then using an anonymous login, post their videos online. How fun was it for them to see others look at their presentations and even comment on them.

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Being mainly an electives teachers, I have the opportunity to change my courses as I see fit. Over the last 7 years, I have used some of my classes to create most of my schools PR needs. Our latest one, involves students creating a modern business card, laptop sticker and folder for our administrators. Its interesting seeing them work on something that will actually be used by someone in the "real world"

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I work on co-curricular skills building in higher education and it is challenging to really engage students in a meaningful way using this model. If we replace the heavy use of technology and replace it with in person, then I would feel comfortable saying that there is evidence of connected learning in my professional practice since we really very heavily on peer led coaching. The only technology enabled component is the sharing of ideas by the coaches online, but there is not reciprocation online by the coachees.

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I am currently teaching in China and sometimes feel disconnected with what some of my old colleagues back in Canada are teaching. A few of my old classmates from teachers college and I decided to start blogging new activities we use inside the classroom. We just recently started this so it still needs work, but I've already used a few ideas that have come from it.

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I work in a setting where there are very few practitioners doing the same work as I do. With little formal research to guide our practice, we are relying on 'tweeting' each other our questions or our 'learnings' so as to share the knowledge more broadly. While it does take some encouragement to cultivate the habit, we have found it to be a worthwhile effort.

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When teaching at a graphic design college, I had practicing design professionals come in to do informal critiques/workshops with my students. They would often come in on their lunch breaks, pick one or two students to sit down with, then spend the next hour working with them on their projects, giving them advice on where to go with their work or practical tips and tricks on how to use the software. The real-world industry perspective that this added to the formal learning environment was invaluable in preparing students for the jobs they hoped to get upon graduation. From a teaching perspective, it required me to get out of my office and cultivate relationships with the kind of industry pros who were not only good designers, but were also interested and skilled in mentoring up and comers.

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From the comfort of my office, I just talked to an educator who works in China; How cool is that?

ETEC 522 gives me the opportunity to expand my network to areas that are significantly different from where I work and live.

I know there is also someone in our class that is in Russia, I can't wait to see what she/he has to say about the school system in that country.