Always growing

 Some rights reserved by hellojenuine.

I've been thinking a lot about how to continue to grow. As a digital literacy coach, I think it is my job to grow and continue to grow. Not just for the sake of growth, but always looking and wondering about how to change and enhance what's happening in the classroom.  

Sometimes I fear that I'm just growing and changing for the sake of growing and changing, other times I'm worried that I'm too stagnant and not growing enough. 

I have honestly felt that we learn the most and change the most when we are feeling uncomfortable. One of the things I try to do throughout the year is to put myself in uncomfortable situations in order to help me see my work from different perspectives. 

So I guess I'm wondering what my next growing opportunity is going to be.  I've tried things from a maker space perspective this year, and it's pretty interesting.  It's especially interesting to see the commonalities between design perspective and systems thinking in environmental education.  I also have loved the idea of critiquing the user experience model, so it's been a lot of fun. 

I'm looking for the next big shake up though so I can change how I'm learning.

Deep Learners

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Just got back from a Deep Learners Conference in Malaysia.  I went with some of my colleagues and presented on "Real Connections".  I posted my first draft up here a couple of weeks ago, but it turned out a lot different after last week.  It ended up like this...

A lot of it was the same, but I wanted to make mention of how I kind of wanted the future to look. 

One of the most interesting aspects of the conference for me was the focus on bad ideas. I like how we can change our thinking around, how we can look at a bad idea and eliminate the "bad" parts of it. 

We had a lot of time to work through our idea, and as a group, we laughed, grew and got to know each other a little better.  I think this focus on having a bad idea and honouring it, really helped us as a team. 

A couple of my colleagues presented which was nice to see us grow as a school. It was all around a great conference actually. I love the format where you can go and discover new ideas in the morning (no big commitment, only twenty minutes) and then do something in the afternoon.  

Check it out if you're keen Deep Learners

Wow?

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I don't often talk about feelings I guess, which is not great; but, this week was crazy.

Two of the things I firmly believed in (not just thought I believed in, but thought everyone believed in) were proven to be untrue this week.  

I believe(d) that people genuinely were starting to care more about our environment, our place, our world, just I guess everything that is involved in our living system.  I thought everyone in the world was moving towards a better (even if it was still far from perfect) world.  Wow, the election proved me wrong.  How can people still deny climate change? How does that honestly still happen?  I honestly couldn't believe it. 

Connected to this, I believe(d) that people are more connected to something in their community or globally now.  I thought that it was more global, but also believed we were just overall more connected to something around us.  Again, isolationism as a result of our election.  How can people seriously believe that we can operate on our own anymore? How can people think that imaginary lines drawn across land mean anything?  What benefits do we have from doing things on our own? 

I don't know.  

I think media failed me and many others, I didn't that this was possible. I understand the role I played, how I was compliant to listen to people who believed the same thing I do, but to not even think of this as a possibility is alarming.  As an educator I have to be more aware of how we actually search and what we intentionally make ourselves available to.  

I think we failed each other.  We haven't really been listening to each other and our problems, we don't know what our community is feeling especially in regard to what they are scared of.  

As an educator I think we have an exciting opportunity to work with students to make sure change is going to continue to happen. But it's been a disturbing week.

First Draft

I've been working on a brief fifteen minutes sense of place presentation for a conference in a couple of weeks.  Most of what I focus on is images, and after going over this a couple of times. I really notice that my font choice needs a lot of work (that will come in the next two weeks for sure).

Regardless it's allowed me to really think out what I believe and try to condense that down into fifteen minutes and I need to entertain other educators as well.  The process is really helpful and this is now my fourth presentation and I can feel my story becoming more focused and clear.

One of the benefits of me doing an image focused slide show is that it helps me tell a story, and the images work with the words to create some new neural pathways.  One of the detriments is that it doesn't make much sense without the story.  However, I'll embed it anyway.




Deep learners is one of my favourite conferences because after the two fifteen minute sessions people choose what they want to spend an hour on in the afternoon.  So the deep dive will be more hands-on based where we can try to sell our favourite places, and maybe dig into some conservation photography.