TL;DR Version: Reflection and notes from week ten, or learning event ten of the #WALKMYWORLD project. Share your work on the spreadsheet, reach out and connect, earn a digital badge.

We’re quickly wrapping up the final week of the #WALKMYWORLD project. Once again, this week were reaching out and connecting with others in the community. Please review the Spreadsheet to make sure that your Storify curation post is included. Please scroll through the posts and find someone that interests you. Reach and connect with them. Several of you have already done this, and it is really cool to see people come together. Thank you.

Next Steps

Many of you have indicated that you would like to engage in this project with your own students. Please continue to use the #WALKMYWORLD hashtag. These blog posts, and the community will always be here for you. We’ll continue to check the hashtag to see what pops up. I’ve already talked with several of you about conducting this work in elementary and secondary classrooms. If you do bring this to your students, please keep a couple of things in mind. First, be sure that you and your students are protected, and that your Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) allows you to do this. (If it doesn’t, fight to change it 🙂 ) Second, never forget some of the challenges and frustrations you had in getting involved in this project. Despite what the “digital natives”  moniker that we’ve bestowed on our students…they’re not hardwired to do this type of work. They’ll need the same supports, scaffolding, and time that you need. Finally, let your students play. Part of this project was getting everyone to play and “geek out” with others online. That is a cool thing. Don’t forget to play.

Studying Our Walk Together

As we mentioned at the beginning of this journey, this (aside from being fun) is a research project. We’re trying to examine multiple research questions focusing on poetry, multimodal construction, social networks, and connected learning. We’re interested in how this type of work could/should happen in the classroom. These results will be presented and published at IRA, NCTE, and LRA. We’ll also share our findings openly online.

Because of this, we’d appreciate it if you would take a minute to complete a short survey we developed about the project. The instrument is designed to help us understand your perceptions about the project, and to learn more about you. The survey is built using Google Forms. Because we’re conducting this research in the open, and sharing this openly, you’ll be able to see the results at the completion of the survey. We thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us.

The survey is available by clicking here.

Finally…BADGES!?!?

Yep. Badges. Those of you that work with us knew that at some point it would come to open, digital badges. Once you’ve completed the learning event for week ten, and you completed the survey, please head on over and earn your digital badge for the #WALKMYWORLD project.

To apply for the badge, please click here.

Image with permission by viewfound