Piggybacked onto EduTech, the MIEE Forum is an annual gathering of Australian MIEE's in Sydney. 2019 is my first year and as always when you put a bunch of innovative learners together, there is always things to learn and take away.
The MicrosoftEDU team have packaged some great experiences, led by Megan Townes and Travis Smith.
​
Learning First - technology second - a book by Liz Kolb stating the obvious! Liz has developed a model for tech integration along the lines of SAMR called the Triple E Framework:
Bron Stuckey took us through some great thinking around Minecraft as a tool for learning. She talked about student engagement being the floor, not the ceiling and actually looking at the tool to cover curriculum goals was important. We examined the amazing Mini Melbourne Minecraft world and brainstormed some ideas for activities we could use with students based on the world:
Our idea was to create a virtual orienteering course using the coordinates and incorporate clues along the ways, puzzles to solve, calculations about scale, distance, speed, all to be completed in a student OneNote.
Dr David Kellerman
This was one of the most mind-blowing presentations I have EVER seen, and I have seen a few! David took us deep down the rabbit hole of AI, bots, Azure and just plain brilliant thinking as applied to his Engineering course at UNSW
Microsoft Teams is the cornerstone of his course, but the AI-driven innovation is stunning. He contended that LMS have in the past destroyed learning communities by individualising rather than socialising and enhancing collaboration. His thinking is that we know how to teach (it has been around a while) but teaching at scale is what we have not mastered. With a course with 600 students and a lecture hall capable of holding only 300, technology is making the scaling a reality.
He has designed a bot (@Question) that when deployed in Teams, looks at time-stamped transcripts from Stream videos for answers, plus aggregates answers from similar questions, this also creates a question playlist for both students and tutors so all questions get answered. The bot is also able to look at answers and ideas from pre-requisite courses and bring those to the students.
The most brilliant work here was in assessment - the machine-learning based on student responses is able to deliver tailored revision packs to each individual student. Marking exams from OneNote was 70% done by cognitive services, leaving tutors much more time to focus on quality feedback.
Article here https://www.itnews.com.au/news/unsw-adds-question-bot-to-online-classroom-for-engineering-students-525188
TeachMeet
Some great ideas shared in 7 min spots:
Lisa Plenty shared her ideas about the importance of staff PL using Workshops, modelling, tech tips. How do we differentiate teacher PL in technology?
Andrew Cornwall (St. Bedes) spoke about the journey to becoming an email-less school internally using Teams. Also the shift to Cloud-based infrastructures rather than drives.
How can we transform the library to a 21C Learning space? Student voice is needed. Ask the question "What words would describe a 21C Library?"
Lyn Barker shared a very relevant idea about using tech tools (notably Microsoft Whiteboard) to enable thinking routines
DAY 2
Some brief notes on Day 2 at the MIEE Summit
Teams redesign
New tiles instead of list
Full Calendar
SDS pending so we don't have to wait until the last minute to create Teams
Import existing Notebooks when creating a Team - great for start of year set up
Session on Stream and Video editor
Lots of work going on in the background with releases soon.
Embedding Forms quizzes in Stream videos is available (still tweaks needed)
Session on Mixed reality by Anson Ho
Huge focus for Microsoft
He described Mixed reality as the 3rd wave of computing (Personal PC - Smartphones - Mixed Reality)
Some good research coming out about student experience with mixed reality
https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/get-started/mixed-reality/guides/
www.maquette.ms Paint3D in VR
https://altvr.com/ VR spaces
Assistive Tech in VR - immersive reader available
Animations in 3D models for PPT and Word
Minecraft Earth aka.ms/joinmee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkVWycOsQXE
Merge cube - app on iOS, Android, PC
Session on Azure Cognitive services - Travis Smith
We looked at all the demos of what the AI in Azure can do https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/cognitive-services/ all of these tools are available free - eg the image tagging software that is obviously what is running in the background of School Bench and Pixevety is available plus a lot more. We did demos of AI with
Vision
Speech
Language
Decision
Search
Image and video tagging content moderation (we have this with another service) https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/cognitive-services/content-moderator/
Challenge session
In teams we worked on a real-life problem of a student who needed significant learning support and how technology could be used to enhance and enable their school experience to be better.