Diving into a new year

 Some rights reserved by AdamCohn

I'm pretty excited about this new year.  A lot of things will be going on.  Some of my grade three teachers will be going one to one with ipads, really going to focus on cognitive coaching with (so far) six teachers (I'm hoping to build on that) and bringing a new fishbowl type model of PD to school. 

All of this goes towards a more personalized style of development.  At times I wonder about how beneficial or damaging personalized learning can be.  I guess it's important not to totally enable enable a learner to dictate everything, but rather create situations where as individuals they can succeed.  Specifically I'm thinking about teachers, and how we need to engage them where they need it most, without offering overly involved amounts of people. 

Hopefully our fishbowl model will address these issues, smaller groups focused on things they need to know (school directed) but build up relationships so we can work on what the teachers want to know and hopefully add in some cognitive coaching as well. 

I start seeing new teachers next week, looking forward to seeing the new teachers and reuniting with the old.  

How do we create wonder?

Pancho wondering

In part of Place * Being * Resonance it discusses the power of technology.  The worry presented is that when we use technology we attack a problem from one point of view, and using one solution in mind.  Regardless of the multitude of options technologically we are still thinking from a technological standpoint, and therefore think about an anthropocentric solution. 

How can we as teachers use technology to enhance education without limiting our options?  The more I think about it the more I wonder if this is what the Redefinition aspect of SAMR could be all about.  How can we really redefine our thinking regardless of the tools we use? 

Derby posits that we must always be open to other ways of thinking and listening to other ways of being without being focused solely on humans and how we interact with the world.  We need to listen to language that isn't always our own (maybe coding) and learn to create, and use metaphor to embody other living things. 

Anyway, I wonder about the power of ipads in situations like this, we can use them to create (always movies or books) that can use examples of this other-mindedness. One of my goals this year is to really try for this.  Capture images (although there is some argument that just looking at images negates the importance of actually being outdoors) create stories that bring about other points of view.  I want my students to really strive to be open-minded and other-minded, and I think using the iPad can help. 

The base of this (I think) is to wonder, actually wonder, critically wonder, Derby would say ironically wonder I think, but really question what we are thinking and why we are thinking it, and wonder about what other voices are being missed.  As always going outside and actually seeing other things is the first step.