Final Project for Coetail

  by Gerry Dincher

Wow, this project took a lot of turns, but I feel it's much better now than when I envisioned it many months ago.


This was my original UbD.

We started off on high notes, all the grade 3 classes started by taking pictures and then blogging about their favourite spots at school, almost all of the students finished and almost all of the students shared with at least one person. So It was somewhat successful as a start.

Most students took a picture of their spot, and thought about it.  Most were of staircases, some were of the lunch area, a couple were of the soccer field.  They then described it with the potential audience of someone who is coming to the school. They used their blogs to write an entry.

Almost all of the students ended with the task, two students (who I was working with a little earlier) picked an outdoor spot and created a stop motion video (which will be in my video).  They then recorded some of the feelings over the images.

One of the students had a spot with a tree, and that tree died.  Just this week we planted a tree in that same spot.  His talking about his spot to his community really made a change in how people viewed their space.

Next time, I would want to have more time with the students.  I only had them once a week, which isn't a whole lot of time to dig deep into places and feelings.  We needed to spend more time on creating a more meaningful platform I think, and developing connections with other places.

I want this to be a more meaningful exercise on developing sense of place, so next time I would work with that as well. I want students to develop emotional connections to people and places. By developing our stories, we can work on this connection. Next time I would try to use more video (stop motion) and blend in more images than just the one.




All in all I enjoyed the whole Coetail experience.  It's been great building the standards into our shared units, and building more meaningful digital citizenship lessons into my co-teaching experiences. I'm going to continue to develop connections, I firmly believe in connectivism and will help my students find people they want to learn from as well.

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Comm-unity

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For +COETAIL most of my community involvement has been focused on #enviroed.  Since I'm merging the tech and environment.  We talk every Thursday, which is pretty amazing, well Thursday for me Wednesday night for everyone else.  Here is one of my favourite chats , mainly because it focuses specifically on tech and 21st century skills in environmental education.

As a group we explore what each other are doing, ask each other questions to get specifics, I've worked with two other teachers on their specific research project, and have asked a couple of teachers to work with me on my coetail project. 

I've been trying to merge these two for awhile

+Nicki Hambleton has helped me out a ton too. We talk often in person. We bounce ideas off each other with pizza and wine (even if we shouldn't always be eating it).  It's great for us (well me definitely) to be able to see reactions and just check in on and get checked in on.  This personally has been one of the most valuable tools for me, not that Nicki is a tool.  But she has directed me towards other people like Kerri-Lee and Dave, and has directed me towards Cognitive Coaching where I met up with other coetailers as well.  

Mostly I feel like I've moved beyond just messing around, I've built part of my community (especially with #enviroed).  Connectivism is a real thing in my life.  I'm building on my connections, sand still reaching out for others.  

It's been a great journey so far, and I'm looking forward to even more in the last month.

Always Learning

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Reading George Couros' blog today about being Learning Savvy. In it he was talking about being tech savvy, and how he isn't always comfortable with the term.

As an EdTech coach, people definitely see me as someone who has technology skills (even though I don't necessarily see myself that way). Like George, I want to be more learning savvy.

Part of my action towards this is working on the Cognitive coaching workshops.  I want to be more focused on how we approach learning, with a tech and environmental ed perspective, but the goal is the same, what is best for students' learning.

Through my project on community, we have just finished our stories, and some of our blog entries.  We've talked about our favourite places and people in hopes that we can connect with incoming students, to make their transitions a little easier. It's not really about the tools we used, it's about what we learned about ourselves, our favourite spots, and how we can improve our community.

Thinking about it

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For +COETAIL I am well into the process of collecting evidence and working with students to share spaces.  I'm not sure how successful it will be but the process is enlightening for sure.

With students these past two weeks (the ones who aren't working on my Coetail project) we are exploring digital citizenship, with the idea that it can shape the future of who we are. 

Spencer Harrison and I used to work together, at the time I wasn't as aware of the idea of personal brand.  I was very conscious of displaying the image I wanted to show with the intention of challenge other people's viewpoints. Spencer was one of the first people to tell me, my image or brand could be shaped without shaping me. 

What this means for digital citizenship is that we aren't always who we appear to be online.  We all need to understand that a google search or looking at someone's facebook, linkedin profile or whatever is not who that person really is.  We can create our identity. 

Since we are creating our identity, we should make sure it's the best version of ourselves, and then try to live up to it. Our digital citizenship classes go into who do we want to be (as in what kind of person) and then how do we take action to be recognised as that type of person, what do they do. 

The last two weeks have been pretty interesting to see what versions of themselves each students wants to present.  They are thinking about their future, about who they want to be online, and how they can achieve this reality. 

Starting the project

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We've started trying to make connections regarding our places in school.  I'm planning on working with students to make meaningful connections.  If you want to know more check out this post for my UbD.

The first thing we did was sit in a circle and talked about what it felt like to move from place to place. We all felt an anxiety about moving, when we dug a little deeper we discovered that this anxiety might be a result of not knowing the place or the people. 

As a group we decided to write blog posts about our favourite place (and soon favourite people) in the school in order to alleviate some of the anxiety potential migrants to our school might feel. 

The students are keen to share what they know about the school, and since it's not content driven most students feel like they know their place, so everyone wants to participate. 

The project isn't fully what I wanted, but it is student driven which is important.  I was hoping for more of a shared project, but maybe it will morph into that.  

I'm also slightly disappointed that more students didn't choose an outside place as their favourite spot, but, it's interesting to see why they chose different places. 

Listening to collaborate

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We've started our project about connecting students, seems okay so far, but we noticed something, we rarely listen.  Before we went online, we started sharing our migration stories, what that meant to us, but no one really listened to the other stories.

One of the worries teachers have about incorporating technology (and one of mine as well) is how much it speeds things up.  We need to slow down in elementary, and really think about why and how we interact with each other.  

It got our whole class thinking about what does it mean to listen.  We threw words around like "focus", "pay attention", "look at the person", and other kinds of things.  We couldn't really define what those things looked like though.  After some discussions and some personal blogging about listening some of the students had some great ideas.  One student though about using only one or two tabs, that would keep her focused on the task at hand.  One other student talked about the importance of finishing her work, and waiting until we finished.  

We transferred these ideas over to "real" life.  By keeping only one tab open, we're only thinking about one thing (the conversation).  By finishing your work before moving on, we're going to wait until the person is finished before we think about responding.  Some abstract ideas for sure, but we're focusing on listening first. 

I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks. For research we're learning to skim and scan, there are more opportunities to look at how to finish more books rather than re-read or read deeply. So much of what we're doing is encouraging students to speed up, then we get frustrated when they don't stop and listen to us.  I really think we need to slow down.  

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Modelling this is going to be important for sure.  How do we listen to our students, what does it mean to be a teacher, especially in a connectivist world?  Lots of wonderings this week as we move forward. 

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Final Project - Making Connections

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I really want students to start thinking about how to make positive connections online, and then transfer those feelings into the "real" world.  I think that if we start fostering a connection before students transition into a new school we can make friendships more meaningful before students come.  We can also make deeper connections to other schools who may not be ever coming to see us.

I'm going to start this project in the new year with the grade 3 class studying migration ( I just checked my first UbD for Coetail and it was also about migration, funny huh?).




The important bit for me is making the emotional connection, the product and most of the process will be student led (I hope) because we are working on empathy and connectivism.

Here's hoping anyway, let me know if you have any ideas.

Problems could be real inquiry

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I think problem based learning is pretty critical for our developing of thinking skills.  We need to start seeing problems without the need for immediate solutions, we need to work with teachers to help students understand it's okay not to know "the" answer.

Often I work with open-ended problem based questions and at the beginning of the year, many students have a difficult time.  They want to know the answer, but in my world there is rarely an answer. 

Using technology seems like an easy way to explore possible solutions to problem based curriculum and as a way to connect. 

This is where my mind has been going, as we're getting ready for course five, connecting, the world, and action. 

I'm wondering how I can pose a problem to my students, and get them to work on finding a solution. 

I think... right now anyway, I'm going to ask them to come up with a solution to my problem.  How can we create a relationship with a community we don't "know".  Working with some colleagues in Ontario, I hope our class can create an opportunity to interact with, and create an emotional connection with a "community" there. 

I think it's a "problem"  because I don't know how to do it, so there is no easy solution.  I just hope we can all be motivated to make it happen.  

This post is a little scattered, but hopefully by our blog next week with the ubd will be sorted. 

(Re)connected

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In George Couros's quick blog about what learning is, he talks about the importance of connectivism.  The whole purpose and idea surrounding education now (or so it seems) is that we can connect to other people, and grow together. Like Louise I've always considered myself a co-constructivist, and I think that these two theories blend together quite well.  We co-create our knowledge, it is no longer limited to within classroom walls, or at a specific time.  Learning is everywhere, all the time.

I think though, that at times, we forget to make those emotional connections to people, places and things.  It's easy to connect and still consume things from others (like we do online most of the time), it's easy to connect and learn on the surface.  But I think for those deep learning opportunities we have to connect emotionally.  It's possible, but not easy. 

In the video about the University of the People we learn about people who have made emotional connections to subjects, and others and how they want to move forward to create a better world.  Daniel Pink talks about how intrinsic motivation works more effectively than any kind of external reward (and as teachers don't we know this already), so we need to make those connections to our work place, and students in order to truly and transformatively change something. 

So this has been my goal this week, with students as well as myself.  Make emotional connections, to things, people, places, I can do this online (and have been with my parents and friends this week), but also take time to do it in the "real" world too.  If connectivism shows the power behind the connections in our learning, then we have to make them meaningful.

I think that slow education can be powerful for this, even if we are online we can have meaningful interactions, we just have to focus on our connections.  Going slow, even online, to make those connections meaningful and emotional can make for powerful learning (I think). 

Spin me right 'round

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I've been wondering about how important "flipped learning" or "reverse instruction" can be for learning for our classrooms.

Initially, and still really, the idea seems obvious to me.  Of course we want students doing, creating and making while we are with them.  Not only because Bloom's Taxonomy says it's a higher level of learning, but because that is the part of teaching that I enjoy the most. 

I've wondered how we can do this in the Primary Years Program as well.  I think that when we are looking over concepts and ideas, we can introduce these at home (through videos). I know that at our school our home learning does not always connect to our daily lives in the classroom.  Our math work is often practice sheets, we have traditional spelling assignments at home, which is not what the teachers I work with do in their classrooms.  I think that providing videos to "tune in" to the day or week's tasks would be incredibly helpful for learning, and overall classroom enjoyment.  More than that, the parents would get a bigger sense of the concept based approach we take at our school. 

This article resonated with me because of the "pitfalls" section.  This is more than just changing a way we teach, it's changing the way we learn and the culture of schools.  These changes can't happen immediately for everyone, we are shifting the culture of what it means to be a leaner, and it's all very exciting. 

I use videos with teachers, for my instruction with them, and then we work together on their projects.  By giving them the main concept of what we want them to know, our face to face time is set on pedagogical approaches to learning and changing classroom culture.  I'm also modelling a basic flipped learning approach. 

We use blendspace to  get teachers used to our google apps approach before school starts. All incoming teachers are asked to go through some short "courses" if they are familiar with google apps they can just take the quizzes.  These short quizzes allow us as Edtech coaches to zero in on what each teacher needs help with, so instead of doing an hour or two on google apps, we can go into individual teacher's classrooms and work with them on the specifics of things they need to be able to do. 

Blended and flipped learning really help us zero in on specifics and get students working their ideas out.  Creation is the most engaging aspect of learning, and a flipped classroom helps us get to the heart of creation. 

Can phenomenology be online?

The Lived Experience 

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Phenomenology is the idea of making meaning from your lived experiences (basically). During my master's research I used this methodology to dig deeper into my understanding of what it meant to be an environmental educator. As a teacher, I believe in the idea of constructivism, and making meanings based on your previous experiences. So much of learning for me is experiential based, we learn by doing, and reflecting on our actions (either in groups or on our own).  With this idea of knowledge as being, I wonder a lot about gamification in the classroom.

What's Real? 

My main questions when thinking about gamification or anything really online, is what is real? If we learn from our experiences, what is an "actual" experience. I think this video is pretty powerful, and I think it's something we have to think about as educators, especially when we are moving beyond "connections".  So as educators when we are thinking about gamification, we have to think about creating authentic gaming experiences.

Gaming versus Gamification 

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Frustrations first, earlier this year we had a math website rep come to our school and talk about how their website gamified education, we had a lms platform come in saying they gamified learning.  They did this through badges and scores.  It totally put me off.  Badges, scores, etc. don't make a game.  A real purpose or challenge makes a game. Through this real purpose you can have opportunities to level up, or earn points but clicking a button to "practice" math skills is not a game. It's clicking a button (that has no real learning value).

I struggle with gamification, because I don't think I like the term.  Apple uses challenge based learning, PYP uses their performance task to illuminate their central idea, and using pedagogy like this to engage your class can create a game like atmosphere.  Setting challenges for students to complete before they meet the next challenge is more what I think of when I think of gamification.  

I loved the minecraft history project video. No where was the teacher trying to create a game like atmosphere. There was a question posed (create a sustainable city) and different ways to reach that goal. I personally have a hard time imaging someone doing a more in-depth job than the student who used Minecraft, but I'm not sure using Minecraft on it's own would've gamified the situation. 

In the "Raising Engagement in e-learning through gamification" there is an emphasis on fast feedback that I believe is crucial.  In games you quickly get a sense if you're winning and losing.  Using connectivism to interact with other people can help you correct your actions.  This formative assessment is crucial for engaged learners. 

One of the quotations from this week that resonated deeply with me was:

"It's not about the technology; it is about new ways of thinking. The barriers are in our heads," Harrison says. "Learning is not about content, it is about creation. Isn't that our job: to help kids learn how to do things? Our job is to prepare children for the world that exists." - Nick Morrison

We need to change how we think about learning, not just gamify something. We need to encourage students to create and engage in their learning, not just consume by clicking buttons.  A program or an app can't do this. Teachers need to do this, and I think creating authentic learning experiences (online or otherwise) is the most difficult part: however, it's likely the most important part. 

Integrating to enhance

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I think we read the old things in old ways article in Course 1.  This article resonated with me (and my frustrations as an EdTech Coach) because often we find something that works, and we just stick with it. A colleague sent me this image and I think it resonates with how I feel at times.

http://hakanforss.wordpress.com/page/2/

This blog is actually really interesting.  Too often we feel like we are too busy to "add on" new ideas and as a result we keep doing the same thing poorly. We can then switch to new things in old ways, and both the coach and the teacher still feel the frustration.

I really like this quotation from edutopia:

Integrating technology into classroom instruction means more than teaching basic computer skills and software programs in a separate computer class. Effective tech integration must happen across the curriculum in ways that research shows deepen and enhance the learning process. link

We need to integrate to enhance learning (and independence), not integrate for the sake of integration.  To do this, I do believe we need a framework (like most things without a framework we lack direction or purpose which makes it difficult to do anything).

I do like SAMR, and have taken a course with Punya Mishra on TPACK in Singapore last year. I like the openness of TPACK and the linear structure of SAMR, I find SAMR much easier to explain to teachers because of ladder images or linear images.

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I'm no longer teaching, so I can't comment on my integration in the classroom all the time. But I do use the idea of enhancing education as the backbone of my work.  We use all kinds of technology (like wood and nails, to ipads and phones, to paper and pencil) and I work with teachers at making sure the learning is at the centre of what we do.