how

TEACH ONE: HOW

Introduction

In this part of the unit you will be introduced to the different elements that together will help you do the Teach One blogpost. This element also takes you through the practicalities of making the Play&Learn Digimedia blog and gives you step by step instructions on how to create your own blogpost. After this element of the unit you should be ready to create and write your Teach One blogpost and put it on the Play&Learn Digimedia platform.

Revisiting the Scripting Template

Before beginning to write the Teach One blogpost we recommend that you first revisit the scripting template you filled out before carrying out the Do One activity.

Looking at the scripting you did of your Do One activity in the left columns of the Scripting Template, you now need to think about how to transform these into a more general scripting that others can understand, be inspired from and try out in their teaching. When transforming your concrete Do One activity in the left columns (Notes for your Do One PLD activity) into a general Teach One blogpost, try to think about how you can best communicate your teaching ideas, actions and experience to others.

When you have tried your best to fill out the right columns of the Scripting Template, you are ready to move on to the actual writing of the Teach One blogpost

The elements of the Teach One blogpost

Your Teach One blogpost should in some way or another try to incorporate and reflect on the following dimensions:

What did you do?

  • This is your description of the playful experiment that you carried out in Do One. An easy way to begin writing this section is to look at the following columns on the right side of your Scripting Template :
    • 1) General description
    • 2) Learners/Context
    • 3) Rationale/Aim
    • 4) Outcomes/evaluation

How did you do it?

  • This is your description of the different steps involved in the playful experiment you carried out in Do One. One way to include this in your blogpost is to integrate the following columns on the right side of your Scripting Template
    • 5) Resources/Technologies
    • 7) Instructions/Steps

How did it go?

  • This is your evaluation of and reflection on the playful experiment carried out in Do One. An easy way to begin this section of the blogpost is to use the following columns of the Scripting Template:
    • 4) Outcomes/Evaluation
    • 6) Critical success factors / possible barriers
  • Also, the parts of your journal entry that reflects on your own experience and observations might be useful here as well: How did it go? What did you expect and what did you experience? Did it go as anticipated? And how could it be evaluated and reflected on as playful simulations pedagogy, teaching through simulations or online teaching and learning?

What did it look like?

  • This is your 'visualisation' of the playful teaching experiment in Do One as well as the 'aesthetics' of your Teach One blogpost. Here you can use photos, gifs, video, interactive slides, drawings or other interactive or multimedia material to make you blogpost come alive for the reader. An easy way to do this is to use the material you made when you documented the playful experiment. But you can also use creative commons material like Wikimedia Commons, H5P material, Unsplash! or make you own. REMEMBER to only use materials you have the rights to use - if you are wondering what that means check out this link.

What is your best advice?

  • This is the reader's ‘takeaway’ from your blogpost where you pass on your best advice, insights, future ideas and identified potentials to the readers. Here, part of your journal entry that contain emerging insights from noticing and wondering as well as identified pros and cons might be a good starting point: Are there any identified potentials, possibilities, limitations or challenges? Did it go as anticipated? What are some key insights and reflections? What ideas came to mind doing the playful experiment? What would you have done differently or like to try next? Can you identify some next steps or see any particular potentials using playful simulations in education?

The above constituent parts of the Teach One blogpost can, of course, be communicated and fashioned in a range of different ways as pointed out in Teach One What and Teach One Why.

The Play&Learn Digimedia blog

In the following your are guided through the process of creating your own blogpost on the common WordPress platform.

  1. Log onto WordPress and you are taken to the Dashboard (See Play&Learn Digimedia landingpage if you dont' know how)
  2. When in the Dashboard, look at the menu to the left and click on Posts
  3. When in Posts click on the Add New button in the upper left corner
  4. Now you have opened the editor and can begin to write your blogpost

In the picture below you can see some of the elements of the blogpost editor.

 

  1. Obviously you need to choose a proper title for your blogpost. When you fill in the title in the title box, WordPress automatically generates an URL for the blogpost. The URL is an “address” that is needed to make your blogpost accessible on the Internet.
  2. You can edit the URL, but keep in mind that it need to be unique.
  3. By clicking on the Add Media button you can add media to you blogpost, either by uploading a image from your computer or by using an image that already is uploaded to the blog.
  4. By clicking on the 2 tabs on the right of the editor; Visual and Text, you can change the mode of the editor. We strongly recommend to stay in visual mode unless you have experience with HTML-programming.

Click here for a more detailed introduction to writing posts in WordPress

When you are done writing your blogpost, there are a few things you should consider before you publish it for the public:

  1. Choose the appropriate category; If you are working with the module Playful Simulations, you should choose the category Playful Simulations and so forth.
  2. Choose a number of appropriate tags; Tags are keywords, that describe the themes or topics of the individual blogpost. tags are saved across the platform, so feel free to find inspiration in tags created by other participants on the platform.
  3. If you have used more than 1 media (picture, video, etc) it might be a good idea to choose a featured image. The featured image is, together with the headline, how the blogpost is represented on the main blog page.

When you have considered and processed these 3 points, you can click the blue Publish button in the upper right corner of the window. When you do that, your post is published and is accessible to anyone who is connected to the Internet. If you would like to give your blogpost a bigger reach, you could share the URL on your favourite social media ie. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or similar. If you choose to do so please use the hashtag #pldigimedia, which is the common hashtag for our project. In using the same hashtag we are supporting each others reach and establishing a means for connecting outside of the platform.

Outro

Now it is time to create your playful teacher blog that communicate your Do One experiment to the teacher community. Your blogpost will be your contribution to the Play&Learn Digimedia community that gives insights to and inspire others on the use of digital media and technology in education. In the last element of the unit you will get a short overview and recap of the entire unit.