DATE: April 24, 2021 | 8:00 AM HKT (90 minutes)
TITLE: Making Learning: The Follow, Tinker, Make, Share Framework
FORMAT: Online
COST: Free for EARCOS member schools
Description: Neuroscience points to the benefits of learning-by-making (constructionism), but teachers and school leaders sometimes struggle with incorporating this method in their learning environments. Most of us simply aren’t trained in these kinds of learning approaches. Handily, the ‘Follow/Tinker/Make/Share’ framework (FTMS) is designed to ease this process, giving you a practical approach for successfully incorporating project-based learning, service learning, or maker learning in your school — regardless of whether you’re meeting in-person or remotely. And you can use this framework regardless of the discipline you teach or the demographic of your learners — you can even use it for professional development.
How does FTMS work? It begins with direct instruction (‘Follow’), with learners creating a flexible ‘platform’ project on which the later steps of the process build. They then proceed to guided practice (‘Tinker’) where they explore, test, and refine their understanding by modifying existing features and elements in this platform project. As part of this process, learners explain their choices, evaluate the changes others have made, and explore ways to integrate what they’ve seen or to make additional changes. These first two steps prime learners for independent practice (‘Make’), where they demonstrate their skills and understanding by building, exploring, inventing, and problem-solving, creating a new project that address a personal or local concern. This third phase also offers a genuine context for situated performance assessment. Finally, at the fourth and final stage, learners engage critically and perform authentic assessment by comparing their projects with those made by others, by submitting their projects to a competition, or by combining their projects with other projects to address a larger problem or to address the existing problem more robustly (‘Share’).
The first interactive session (of two), begins by outlining some of the research behind this framework for making and then introduces you to its structure (about 20 minutes). Then, using MIT’s Scratch programming language (a block-based coding language accessible to everyone — even non-coders), we start with a ‘platform’ Follow project and then Tinker with it, sharing our results to give everyone a feel for how the FTMS process works in practice (about 30 minutes). We conclude by launching a project designed around teaching in the age of Covid — the project that will form the basis for the second workshop as well. We’ll introduce a ‘platform’ process and then begin the Tinker phase, preparing you to develop a customized project for your school (about 30 minutes). An online portal will provide opportunities for discussion, sharing, and collaboration between the workshops.
DATE: May 8, 2021 | 8:00 AM HKT (90 minutes)
TITLE: Designing Learning: Building Follow/Tinker/Make/Share Projects
FORMAT: Online
COST: Free for EARCOS member schools
Description: This workshop will focus on the projects generated during the Tinker and Make phases, giving you an opportunity to share the projects (either formal or informal, school or community based, learner directed or staff-development directed) that you’ve developed for your own classes or institutions according to the Follow/Tinker/Make/Share (FTMS) framework (around 60 minutes). This second workshop is designed to provide every participant with a project that makes sense structurally, disciplinarily, and culturally within the contexts of your own classes and institutions.
During the concluding part of this workshop, we’ll offer a series of specific guidelines you can use to generate your own ‘platform’ projects and recreate FTMS experiences for your schools, colleagues, and learners. We’ll also offer opportunities to ask questions and comment on your experience of the FTMS Framework (around 30 minutes).
Many people attend conferences and witness energizing presentations and ideas, but leave with little that lasts or translates into their own milieux. Our goal with this two-workshop series is to give you a guided, hands-on experience that provides you with the support you need to make meaningful projects and a practical, productive tool that you can carry back to your institutions and really use.
Dr. William Rankin is a learning-experience and learning-frameworks designer and educational theorist who served as worldwide Director of Learning at Apple from 2013 through 2016. An academic with more than 25 years of classroom experience, Rankin helped design the world’s first iOS-based one-to-one learning program for higher education, for which he was named Campus Technology magazine’s Innovator of the Year for mobile learning in 2008. In 2009, he was named an Apple Distinguished Educator, and in 2010, he began a three-year tenure on the US Board of Apple’s Distinguished Educators program.
Rankin has spoken at educational conferences around the world, including TEDxDubai 2011, EDcrunch Moscow 2016 and 2018, and EduLEARN Spain 2019, and he was a featured presenter at London’s Bett Show in 2018 and 2019. With colleague Bea Leiderman, he co-authored A Learning Journey, a professional development workbook and guide for the Educational Collaborative for International Schools (ECIS) in 2018. Interviews with Rankin have appeared in Wired, The Guardian, The Times of London, Businessweek, The New York Times and The Chronicle for Higher Education and at online sites including InsideHigherEd, Ars Technica, and Open Culture. He has worked with schools, governments, and learning organizations in more than 30 countries to design, develop, and implement innovative learning and is an expert in mobile- and technology-enhanced learning and constructionism.
Bea Leiderman is a teacher and instructional coach in Richmond, Virginia. Her work focuses on helping teachers create environments in which students can demonstrate their learning through creative, open-ended projects. During her tenure as a member of the instructional technology team in Goochland County, Bea helped design and implement a 1:1 iPad and MacBook program focused on deeper learning through project based activities. With a small team of coworkers, Bea developed a modified version of Scrum to help teachers and students manage long-term creative projects. The program was highlighted in ISTE’s Entrsekt magazine in June of 2016, and Leiderman has shared her expertise and ideas for using Scrum with teachers at regional, national, and international conferences. In 2009, Bea was selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator and has participated in planning the EdTechRVA and Virginia Society for Technology in Education (VSTE) educational technology conferences for several years. She served as Chair of the Greater Richmond Area Educational Technology Consortium (GRAETC) for 2017–18. Leiderman’s interests revolve around learning — and how learning happens. To this end, and following her own personal interests, she photographs and studies insects, arachnids, fungi, and slime molds using macrophotography. She has authored six interactive educational books on insects featuring her photos, which are available for schools to use in exploring ecosystems, biodiversity, biology, and sustainability. Bea has presented at a variety of international educational conferences, including Bett 2019. Bea is a partner and co-founder at Unfold Learning.