These are the notes of our grade 1/2 teacher Pauline O’Hara. I have seen similar thoughts expressed in Who Owns the Learning by Alan November, but these are all Pauline’s original thoughts on what we can be doing to motivate our kids.
What do you know? make a personal poster entitled Yes I Can! Fill it with sticky notes stating what the student already knows.
Start small and grow
ask me about…
I know more stuff…
now I know…
look what else I know….
I learned…
next – have students share what they know with students in other classes
Set goals to learn more new stuff that can be shared with other students.
Make the passion for knowledge PUBLIC
There are no uninteresting subjects, only uninterested people
It’s not about the sauce, it is about the process. The process is the gift
Teachers are “learning salespeople” – sell the product!
Share your curiosity with someone else. If someone does not know how to wonder, share how to develop that skill!
Get parents involved too – they too must promote learning and curiosity, they can share their knowledge with their children
tell your story: be visible, live out loud, create value, leverage video and social media, reflect and blog
stay connected
consider frameworks such as the SAMR model as an ongoing change model
consider the power of students teaching students through video
nurture those around you
Mark Carbone, President ECOO
These are all great ways to move forward from this point. I consider myself very fortunate to have received such great PD over the past six months. The CASA conference in July, Will Richardson @willrich45 at our Director’s Conference and of course #ECOO13.
I have to thank my superintendent Simone Oliver @SimoneROliver and our IT guru Rob Long @longrwr for giving me these wonderful opportunities! Now, I need to keep the learning going.
For one thing, I have to go back to lanyard and collect more information from the workshops I attended – I will go back and add this to the posta already up.
Next, what do I do when I return to school?
One idea. I loved the Minds on Media session. I had great conversations with teachers and I learned about cool apps
I would like to make the rest of this year a Minds on Media session.
Our teachers are doing great things every day. They use Raz Kids, Dream Box, mathletics, Edmodo, Edublog, Kidblog, Blogger. They use iPads, netbooks and now Chromebooks. They are doing incredible things all the time.
On top of all that, they work in collaborative teams with teachers from two other schools – they are all involved in really interesting inquiry projects – the first set of projects will be complete by the end of November.
So, this is what I am going to do:
make a visual record of the innovative teaching that is going on every day
give our staff an audience by posting their work here on this blog
create a visual record of the work of our triads – journey with them through their inquiries
celebrate, encourage, support, serve and learn from our teachers
This is such a challenging time for teachers – every day they are confronted with some new form of technology. They are being asked to change their teaching methodology to support an entirely new learning environment. They are being asked not to deliver information but to create intelligence out of the mass of information our students now have access to.
Has there ever been a more challenging time – I would say no.
So what do I need to do? See myself as the lead learner in the school and accompany our teachers on the rocky journey to incorporate technology into a new way of teaching – the journey will be rockey because not everything will work – but if you don’t take risks you will never learn, and we are all about learning!
one triad at work – as principal, my role will be to support and accompany them on their learning journey – and of course celebrate!!
Cube for Teachers is a collaborative platform designed exclusively for Ontario educators. Here, K-12 teachers are sharing thousands of links pertaining to curriculum-based resources, digital tools and teaching strategies as well as creating powerful PLNs. In this session, teachers will participate in an interactive workshop to fully understand the power of effective collaboration and learn how the features are saving educators valuable time.
Professional bookmarking for teachers – and its free!
Based on Ontario curriculum – search by specific topic areas, includes teaching resources
search returns ranked by relevance
data is current and relevant
searches 4 data bases at the same time – Province – Board – Groups – Favourites
groups can be any topic and you can invite people in
solution – use this as a resource for finding resources and contributing resources. When you add a resource, you can tweet about it to create more awareness
Learn to incorporate global collaborative projects with your primary students. Discover strategies and resources for engaging students in all curriculum strands with authentic student examples.This presentation will highlight resources for facilitating learning through global collaboration. Student blogging, global read alouds and collaborative projects will be explored in depth.
Support notes from Kristen
Thank you so much for attending my session. If you have any questions or comments you can find me online in a lot of places. Listed below are some of the ways you can get a hold of me:
Mystery Skype – skype to someone and you have to figure out where they live. Students ask questions to the Skype connection
Mystery number – using Skype or Twitter – one class chooses a number the other class tries to figure it out.
Sharing an inquiry – any question can be explored between classes
Primary Blogging Community – project linking up classrooms to blog together – now has 80 classrooms working together K-4
What is the Primary Blogging Community?
The PBC is a community of primary teachers (children aged 5-10) that want to share their students’ learning via their classroom blog and their students’ personal blogs. Classrooms will be grouped with 3 or 4 other classrooms from around the globe. The program is 8 weeks long. The first 4 weeks will concentrate on the classroom blogs only. Each week, one of the classes will be the focus class and the other 3 classes will be visiting and commenting on the focus class blog. The following week, the second class will be the focus class, and so on. This is a chance for the other classes to see what is happening in your school and class, to discover where in the world you are located and to learn about how to write a good blog post and to watch how you model and work together to write good comments. After the first 4 weeks, we switch the focus from your classroom blog and concentrate on student blogs. The same rotations occur but the focus is solely on your student’s individual blogs.
Flat Stanley Project – everywhere that Flat Stanley went the students blogged about this. Example of a multi-media Flat Stanley site
A key point for blogging – kids need an audience! If you close your blog the students have no audience and they will lose interest. Consider the potential of teaching other students around the world. Kids need the feedback and comments.
One computer? No Problem! One Camera? No Big Deal! No Money? Easily solvable! Creating a “Movie Studio” environment is fun way to engage your students in demonstrating their learning in a dynamic and creative way. This session will explore ways that you can turn your classroom into a film studio that is capable be of producing Short Films, Documentaries, Zombie Movies, Cartoons, Stop Motion Animation, Shadow Puppetry, and so much more. Let’s turn our students into the next great filmmakers!
Students creating their ideas
preplanning process through storyboarding
Tools to use for movie making
smart phones all have movie making capabilities
video cameras
DSLR cameras
green screens
apps – pic stip (example)
apple computer – imovie
one camera – station
one camera and computer – use the computer for editing
examples:
shadowpuppetry – one or more cameras editing software, a lamp a white sheet, metal hangers, cut-outs and time – lunch hours
Stop motion animation –
tools – NFB Pixstop App or other stopmotion apps computers and cameras, smart phones with apps – iPads (1 per group of 2 kids)
subject – what we learned in the first 100 days – over 3000 pictures, students had to come up with the story, develop the story board, teacher helped with the editing
Jaime Casap is the Global Education Evangelist at Google, Inc. Jaime evangelizes the power and potential of the web, technology, and Google tools in education. He helps educational organizations across the world find ways to utilize these tools in support of new learning models.
Google Senior Edu Evangelist & Tech & Learning’s Most Influential. Hoodlum from Hells Kitchen focused on making edu the silver bullet and using tech as a tool!
Jaime Casap is the Global Education Evangelist at Google, Inc. Jaime evangelizes the power and potential of the web, technology, and Google tools in education. He helps educational organizations across the world find ways to utilize these tools in support of new learning models. His team is responsible for bringing Google tools to millions of administrators, teachers, and students across the globe. Jaime was named one of Tech & Learning’s Top 10 Most Influential in Education, and is a SXSWedu (South by Southwest) Distinguished Speaker.
Jaime serves on the Science Foundation Arizona Board of Directors, on the Board of Directors for New Global Citizens, is a member of the Digital Learning Council, and on the Executive Advisory Board for Arizona State University’s Department of Information Systems.
In addition to his role at Google, Jaime is a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University, where he teaches graduate classes in leadership, innovation, and public policy.
Notes:
For the longest time, your location determined your success in school.
Now, all the libraries are at our fingertips.
We have to ask the question, why does the grade 7 class today look the same as 20 years ago?
We haven’t switched our philosophy about what to do with this information. Since the 1960’s we have been talking how technology will change education.
But now – we have the start of a new philosophy
Learning is personal – it doesn’t make sense that there is one model for all
Technology is totally ingrained into our lives – most of us use the web before we are even awake!
The web generation – technology is part of their lives – it has been all their lives. How they learn is different from how we learned. Their expectations are very different than ours.
Are we ready for this generation of kids?
What they have now – is the worst technology they will ever see – how do we deal with these expectations?
Now we need to ask kids – what problems do you want to solve? The resources they have at their fingertips is unbelievable, se we need to teach them to be problem solvers.
There is only iteration, there is only the next step, it’s only iteration that counts in this world. We want to be able to teach them to move things forward.
They need to know how to collaborate – this is more than working together, it is understanding another point of view.It is to be able to sit there, listen to another person and change their mind.
Kids need to become digital leaders, not just consumers of content. They need to create on-line.
They also need to be good searchers – most of us are. Command F – can be used to find a specific item on a web site. Our job as educators is to take information and turn it into intelligence.
What we also recognize – great change only comes about through education. Teachers now will create what the next generation will look like – what the next level of intelligence will look like.
As administrators – we need to give our teachers space. The most important person/factor in the room is the teacher not the technology.
We need to find out what professional development we need to keep these teachers current – that is how administrators can help.
Broadband and devices are now part of the infrastructure of the school – it has to be at the fingertips of the students.
Innovation must cause innovation – innovation is education- it is what we do with our technology
Can we imagine what technology will look like 2, 5, 10 years from now. Education is the silver bullet, not technology. Teachers need to use technology to teach, creating a new way of doing something. Education is the only thing that can change society. But we need to have new models to do this!
Finally, check out my storify in the next blog post!
Very cool – I get to spend 45 minutes with Doug Peterson, the person I read the most on Twitter!!
Being a connected educator opens doors to the fire hydrant known as the internet. With so much available, how do you find and read the best? But it goes far beyond that – in this session, we’ll discuss how reading can become social, talk about the benefits, and share some techniques to becoming a social reader and really, a social curator.
How do you share your Good Reads?
reading tools
Twitter
Facebook
Diigo
Rebelmouse
Instapaper
Zite
Packrati.us – really cool tool will send your tweeted articles to your Diigo account
all great for the iPad
Alltop – will grab stories that you want especially if you create an account
Popurls – again can customize if you create an account
Pulse Reader – a good RRS reader
Flipboard – again a great tool on the iPad, great reading program, you don’t click, you flip
Trap.it – focuses on a concept not a web site
Paper.li – creates for you a daily newspaper based on your Twitter followers
Ontario Bloggers http://bit.ly/1eBwt67 – live binder of Ontario educators – broken down into various categories, teachers, principals, consultants etc
if its good enough to read its good enough to share
connect your twitter account to other social media accounts
build your library of knowledge and share it with others!
Diigo becomes your personal curated Search Engine
Filtering makes this work –
Connect to @dougpete! always terrific curated material
another tool to use is Learnist – by categories, relevance, date
Wonderful Time!!
Here is a transcript of Doug’s notes:
Here is an annotation of the slides that go with my presentation from the #ECOO13 Conference. At the bottom of the page is the Google Presentation that I used. I had originally planned to use SlideIdea on the iPad but decided to present from my laptop so that I could use wired internet.
Slide 1 – Title
Slide 2 – I read in bed!
Slide 3 – How do you share your good reads? I’ve shared and been the beneficiary of sharing all my career. Biggest insight was from the Teacher Librarian at my school. He would read newspapers and relevant articles to our mailboxes. We’ve come a long way since then. In a digital world, sharing is so much easier!
Slide 4 – I’ve always been a reader throughout my life. The most recent case where it helped was filling in for a pregnancy leave at the university. The students were to blog but they didn’t know about what! So, I started sharing things via Twitter and told them to follow me and blog about one of the topics that I shared. It turned out that there were others other than the class that started to read what I was sharing and I got a lot of flack when I stopped. So, I restarted.
Slide 5 – There are opportunities to share what you’re reading and thinking about via many social media platforms.
Slide 6 – I talked about my social media flow. I drew a chart that showed my reading in the cloud and what I do with it. For me, it’s more than just a quick read. I want to share it and I also want to keep track of it. By sharing to Twitter, I have Packrati.us monitor my Twitter feed. Every time I send a Twitter message that contains a link, it gets posted to my Diigo account. The advantage of doing this? Because it ends up in Diigo, it means that I’ve read it at least once and found that it was good. Now that it’s in Diigo, I’ve bookmarked it. With modern browsers like Firefox or Google Chrome, I can make my Diigo account my search engine. Now, when I look for something, I search there first knowing that I’ve already previewed the content. In effect, the links are almost always guaranteed to be a good source.
Slide 7 – The neat thing is that people on Twitter can learn along with you. Check the activity of your account when you’ve sent a Twitter message and you’ll see that some people will have retweeted or favourited the resource.
Slide 8 – Some of the tools that I use.
Slide 9 – Zite – Major reading source which searches the web based on content, not necessarily an RSS feed. Zite finds resources that I would never find otherwise. It needs to be filtered but great resources can be “thumbed up” so that you see more of that content.
Slide 10 – Rockmelt – I loved it as a browser; I loved it as a social reading program. Recently, it was acquired by Yahoo! and retired but I keep it in the slide deck on the hope that Yahoo! brings it back in some incarnation.
Slide 11-18 – Other reading sources – Learnist, NewsSquares, Pulse Reader, Flipboard, Trapit all serve as great collector of stories for me. The key is to seed the types of stories and the type of news feed that I want. They all do their job and bring in news stories for me. I spread the sources around because we are dependent on a resource that will be there when we need it. Should one of these go away, (oh no), I’ll have the others. I don’t have all my eggs in one basket. I also demonstrated Alltop and Popurls since I was in a browser already.
Slide 19 – But that’s me. I’m a proud member of an educational community that is also reading and sharing resources. I use Paper.li to generate newspapers highlighting what others are reading. Combine this with my stuff is a great way to stay informed.
Slide 20 – Ontario Educators – It’s easy to get overwhelmed by content from other countries. I think it’s important to stay on top of what’s happening in Ontario. As I find new blogs from Ontario folks, I’ll add them to this Livebinder.
Slide 21 – I think it’s important that you reflect on your reading. I would encourage all learners to start their own blog to comment on articles or create new ones of your own. If you’re using D2L though eLearningOntario, why not blog there? Or at any of the major reliable blogging platforms.
Slide 22 – Sharing. That’s what it’s all about. I really believe that if it’s good enough for you to read and learn from, it’s good enough for others as well.
Slide 23 – Filtering is a key skill. Will Richardson made a great point once – Zite filters EdTech, I filter Zite, all he has to do is filter me. (Good luck with that, Will)
Slide 24 – Call to Action – I hope that people in the session consider sharing their learning as well. When we all share, we all benefit and grow because of it.
Slide 25 – Links to the resources that I shared.
Since I did the presentation in my browser, I also shared Alltop and Popurls that happened to be open at the time.
Various technologies can be used to make thinking visible. We began exploring blogging within this context, but soon it became apparent that there were more reasons to encourage student blogging than just visible thinking. Blogging allows students to create, rather than just consume. It affords them the opportunity to collaborate and create a community, among other advantages.
This session will look at the power of blogging, demonstrate how blogging can be used across various grades, levels and subjects, and discuss the practical issues of student blogging.
Questions we will discuss include: How can you get students to buy-in? How can you get students to blog regularly over the course of a semester? How can you evaluate student blogs? How can you avoid pitfalls?
a way of getting thinking out there so we could talk about it
allows students to choose what they are going to write about, also will give them a real audience for the first time. Gives students a community that can continue outside of school.
Types to use – Blogger, edublogs, wordpress – all vary in level of difficulty
single or multi-blogs – which to use?
One blog – easy for the teacher to see all comments at one time. Or, you can give a Blogger account to each student so they can customize the blog.
Challenges:
having students take it seriously – at first, kids may not take this seriously have to be taught this as well. Needs to be addressed
developing rich posts and comments – you need to write so that people can respond – students need to be taught how to do this.
lack of ownership (multi-author blog) – second year, each student set up their own blog and they needed to comment on what was going on in class. Objective – to get the students to communicate. When they get to write about something they are interested in the quality of the posts get better.
rigidity (seen as solely a classroom activity) – if set up as a classroom activity students will not blog on their own
lack of feedback – kids were not getting real feedback from others in school or out of school #comments4kids on twitter can encourage people to respond
instructions for setting up – students need to have explicit instructions on how to set the blog
label/tag – students need to get used to making multiple tags including their name so that you can find the writer
marking – blog post rubrics available – important to have this.
interesting point – you can’t force blogging, it comes and it goes, so how can we do this for the students? Lisa’s blog
where to next – the teachers will continue with it! The teachers have blogged their experiences on their own blogs.
Superintendent of Education - Toronto District School Board, TEDx speaker, writer, thinker, creator, designer, mommy, teacher, leader, learner of all things, keeper of memories.
Celebrity portrait photographer Brian Smith Pictures iconic portraits of Hollywood's A-List and Fortune's 500. Portrait photographers in Miami Beach Florida
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