Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
vTapestry, teaming to promote, cultivate, and support real-world learning solutions
spOtOn: Practical Implementation
vTapestry creates and delivers innovative professional development products and services
for a range of applications. Our vision is to support educational professionals in meeting
the diverse challenges presented by a global community; our mission is to create and deliver
high-quality professional development tools and resources to improve learner success.
Far more than just another pretty website, the spOtOn model brings the best of the best
together, teaming • to promote targeted information for teachers
with free, online learning modules, • to cultivate ‘best practices’ through
online summaries posted to and cross-linked with various websites, and
• to support just-in-time answers to individual questions within a secure social network –
• to realize real-world learning solutions that are shared by relevant social media.
Looking only at the nSIGHTS learning module, here’s how the spOtOn pathway plays out
from the learner’s point of view... Lifelong learners see our ‘ads’ (digital
flyers, video clips, Facebook posts, conference programs, journal articles, etc.) or download
the planned Learning Disability Diagnoser (LDD) mobile app and eventually land on the
spOtOn website. Then they go to a project page (for example, nSIGHTS or any of the other
6 modules as they appear) to study the learning module which features external resources like
our Facebook page, the glossary flashcards, expert community of practice partner website
(COVD in the case of nSIGHTS), and so on. In the last section of the learning module,
learners are encouraged to ‘show what they know’ by taking an optional competency quiz.
On ‘passing’ the quiz, a personalized spOtOn certificate of acknowledgement can
be downloaded and printed immediately. The results will be sent to the vTapestry
‘database’ where we can connect them to the learning module performance statistics.
If all set criteria are met, the Mozilla OpenBadge repository will be ‘pinged’ (or prompted)
to ‘issue’ (or award) the appropriate spOtOn badge so the learner can display it
digitally wherever they choose (i.e. their own Facebook pages, personal and professional
websites, resumes, and more)! Those folks to be our ‘grassroots’ self-starters who
will help sustain the model. When others (i.e. employers, peers, friends and even friends
of friends) click on the badge icon, vTapestry credentialing details validate the source.
The badges also include a link right back to the spOtOn website! We aim to keep learners
coming back… and hopefully motivate others to undertake study of additional modules.
And so the cycle would continue… Another key consideration in our selection
process was the ability to collect usage data on each component. This functionality provides
a virtually real-time snapshot of spOtOn’s reliability (in terms of system integrity)
and impact (in terms of learner success) – as well as our reach (which will support maintenance/updates
while guiding marketing directions).
Because the only thing that stays the same in online education is change, we’ll create
everything as stand-alone files that can be archived and also ‘mixed-and-matched’
to create other views. As James Zull notes in The art of changing the brain: Enriching
the practice of teaching by exploring the biology of learning,“We can’t get inside
and rewire a brain, but we can arrange things so that it gets rewired.”
With so many mainstreamed applications available today, we wanted something ‘cool’ but
knew we needed everything to be stable... and intuitive… and it had to all fit together,
simply. Keeping the teachers – educational professionals – in mind for each decision,
seamless integration was imperative for the practical implementation and will remain especially
key in helping us select the right tools for each aspect of ‘the job’ of promoting,
cultivating, and supporting high-quality professional development tools and resources to improve
learner success.