Introduction 0.4 - An introduction to facilitating the OER4Schools programme
The OER4Schools Professional Learning Resource
Things to consider when facilitating workshops
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Learn about ideas for facilitation
The organisation Seeds for change has good resources on facilitating workshops and meetings. If you are running this programme as a series (bi-)weekly two-hour meetings, please have a look at the short guide for facilitating meetings, or the full guide for facilitating meetings. If you are running whole day workshops, you might also want to look at the short guide for facilitating workshops, or the full guide for facilitating workshops.
Procedural things
Timing. As a workshop facilitator, you should consider how to use the present material, and what form your workshop will take. The resource could be used in
- weekly or bi-weekly session of say 2 hours each (e.g. teacher group meetings in a school or regular scheduled sessions in a teacher education college),
- for whole day workshops,
- or a mixture of those.
You should negotiate this with the participants. We provide guidance but as a facilitator running a course based on these materials you will need to make your own plan, and evaluate this plan as you progress.
ICT use in the classroom will be introduced in the workshops. Teachers need a basic level of ICT skills, for instance how to type, how to open a web browser and open applications, how to write documents and spreadsheets, etc. If your workshop participants have no prior ICT skills, you need to allow time for them to practise those skills.
Follow-up and practical classroom activities: End each session with planning for follow-up activities, eg classroom trials, lesson planning, readings, etc. Each session has got follow-up activties which are reviewed at the start of the next session.
As the workshop facilitator, clearly signpost what is happening at each stage in the workshop. E.g. you might say “We now look at interactive teaching.“
Adapting the format of the resource to the specific context. Ideally, there would be at least the following contexts:
- Paper only. Possibly only the facilitator has a copy of the materials but ideally users do too.
- Semi-digital: There’s one computer / projects
- Fully digital: There are several computers with sound, and participants are able to watch various videos in groups.
ICT practice: Different-tasks group work with ICT and activity planning
Each session has got a space reserved for doing ICT practice, many of these (especially in later units) are just called "ICT practice: Different-tasks group work with ICT and activity planning".
While participants learn about their own use of ICT, it is really important that participants are aware of their own learning process. While they are learning about ICT, participants should think about how they could engage their students in the same learning process.
This of course could apply to learning anything new, but in the context of the OER4Schools programme, ICT is likely to be a completely new skill, so it's particularly important to bring awareness to the process.
Depending on the ICT availability and the number of participating teachers, it may be a good idea to draw up a timetable as to when which teachers (and classes) use the available netbooks. This ensures that
- there are no clashes, but also
- that the netbooks are used as much as possible.
It may be helpful to have this timetable on public display, and teacher "tick" their slot when they have actually used the ICT. If there is little or no use of the ICT by teachers in class, then this should be discussed, for instance in the session slot named "Connecting with overarching goals of the programme" (see below).
