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. 

Stopping consumerism in the Classroom

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Well this Saved by the Bell Hooks tumblr site has me pretty intrigued. I wonder about this all the time, especially regarding tech.

So many teachers (it seems like anyway) are focused on what apps to use for learning, and so many of these apps (it seems like) are about consumerism, or button clicking or "gamification" that involves little learning.  I fully want students to create and connect, not just consume. I want them to create for freedom, and to help them become full participants in our society. 

So, I need to really think about how I'm modelling these traits in my own learning journey.  I think this ties nicely into environmental education too, because most people know about climate change but not many people are taking meaningful action (myself included most of the time) to become the change. I'll be focusing on this through our community building activities online this week.

Working on Community

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I was reading this George Couros blog about smiling the other day about the importance of smiling and being aware of everyone in the learning community. I often think about who I am including when I go about my day, and who I may be excluding.  I know that at times I focus solely on the students, and miss out on support staff and families.  So this past week my goal was to engage them all with a smile.

Smiling made a bigger difference than I thought.  Not only were people more interested in what I was doing, or what I had to say, but I actually felt better about my day too.

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. 

Thinking about community

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As an edtech coach, and an environmental educator, I find that most of my conversations happen with people who I think are in my community.

So, I wonder... who am I missing, who am I marginalizing, am I really growing as an educator? 

I hope so, but anyway, it's a wonder.   A crazy busy week, well two weeks, but working hard on my enviroed project. 

It's funny because I always want to push kids to go further, but so often I let teachers feel comfortable.  If we learn from being uncomfortable am I making it difficult for my colleagues. 

Not much to write today, just want to write so I don't forget to keep in the loop.  Next blog post will be about the project.

How disruptive is silence?

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Just returned from a course on Cognitive Coaching with Bill and Ochan Powell where we talked about the power of listening, and being uncomfortable can be to our learning.

One of the things I started last year (and Bill and Ochan mentioned at the workshop) was the idea that as teachers, we don't really teach listening.  Well maybe some teachers do, but things like looking at a person, focusing, and keeping eye contact doesn't really mean listening to me.  I think listening means being able to summarize the thoughts of another, and make connections (without the purpose of summarizing or making connections).  I don't know, I find it hard to fully describe (probably because I was never really taught).  Listening can be powerful, in this course we spent a lot of time listening, to each other, our instructors and ourselves, and honestly, I learned a lot. Mostly because I was quiet. This was incredibly difficult for me, I'm almost always trying to make connections to what people are thinking, and stopping myself from talking was something I had to learn. 

The point is, I think anyway, that making myself uncomfortable, really improved my learning.  Putting myself in a new situation, really trying to figure out someone else's point of view, helped me learn more about them and myself. 

Since my main wondering are with technology and the environment,  I wonder how we can incorporate silence into our learning with technology.  So often we use our tech to distract us from the silence and those uncomfortable moments.  This, I feel, takes us away from those deeper learning opportunities. 

As teachers who use technology how do we initiate and establish those silence moments with a device, first in ourselves and then in our students? How can we make listening (active listening, or reading) a habit online rather than just consuming?