Ms. Weir’s Musings

The word “perceptions” has been the theme of the day in my world.

I think it’s really interesting to note the opinions people develop based on their impressions from the media. I was listening to a conversation this morning where people were discussing how they feel the media is ruining the minds of our students and making them incapable of original thought. It was interesting for me then to observe the commentary that then shifted to how Twitter seems to be useless and a waste of time.

In this case I think the media has done a great deal to influence educated and very intelligent people to draw conclusions without first verifying the facts. In some ways I can agree that there are people out there who give updates that may seem useless or uninteresting to others, but in reality, who are we to judge what’s useless or not? Maybe Twitter is bridging the gap for some people and giving them a voice that they never really had before. Or maybe there are people out there who want to know these what others would consider “mundane” details and that’s perfectly acceptable. What frustrates me about this whole scenario is that educated people are under the impression that Twitter is just a time waster when they haven’t personally experimented with its applications and are just parroting the media.

The other aspect of this issue that has me thinking is hearing other teachers comment that social media is “ruining” our students’ minds. I’ve heard many comments lately suggesting that what our students do now in their personal time (Facebook, Myspace, texting, music choice, movie choice, etc.,) is leaving them devoid of substance. On one hand, I can see their point with the fact that most of this media is targeted at tweens and teens with the purpose of making a profit, but it’s what the students do with this social media that I think is being left out of the equation. Here are just a few of my observations:

* Students are far more connected than we were at that age. They have strong social networks with whom they engage on a very regular basis (communication).

* Many students also engage in “mash-ups” where they take two different ideas and put them together (creativity/synthesis).

* Many students have digital cameras, digital video cameras or phones that do still photos, videos or both that they use to create content and post it to the web (creativity/production).

* Students then view the works of others via Youtube, Facebook or other social networking sites and offer feedback (critical thinking/collaboration).

From what I can observe, I don’t think that what students are doing is a waste of time or making them devoid of substance, rather it’s practicing skills for their futures. Granted some of the content of their productions makes us adults cringe, I think the skills and creativity that goes into these productions is what needs to be celebrated.

Again these observations leave me pondering… are we that afraid to try something new? Are we just like Reverend Shaw Moore in Footloose and afraid that engaging in this kind of behaviour will lead to something worse?

Unfortunately, what has me cringing is the irony of it all…

Tonight I had the privilege of participating in the Ontario Powerful Learning Practice (PLP) webinar hosted by Will Richardson and my mind is still buzzing with excitement! Will discussed “Seven Shifts” in education right now and even though I found all seven shifts to be engaging and thought-provoking, the one that resonated with me the most was moving from “Standards Based Learning to Passion Based Learning.”

I’m a relatively new teacher, but I find there are times when already I feel slightly jaded about what we are doing in our classrooms. I have been really trying to think about education from the perspective of my students and what I keep coming back to is that I don’t feel we are doing enough to prepare them for their futures. The 21st century skills that the minority of us are encouraging like collaborating and synthesizing are still being overshadowed by the focus on rote memorization and the regurgitation of information. I was chatting this weekend with my best friend who is an occupational therapist and she told me that she feels the most important concepts we can be teaching our students are to be good collaborators, critical thinkers and how to FIND good information. She also made a really interesting point, though, about our stronger students and she suggested that we still need to be preparing our students for college and university as in her experience in undergraduate work at university, it still seems to be rote memorization.

Which leads me to another line of thinking in this reflection. How do we encourage the colleges and universities to adopt this shift in thinking? For my students who are planning on attending university, I often find myself giving them coping and studying strategies so that they can be prepared for the onslaught of information. In all seriousness though, what’s the point of having students go to university to study really hard then forget almost all the content because they never truly did commit it to their long term memories? I think back to my undergraduate days and I virtually remember nothing except how stressed I was at exam time. How does that prepare students for real life? I can really only remember one professor clearly and that’s because he challenged my ideas and opinions and forced me to think outside the box. What does that say about my university experience that if in five years of higher level education I can only remember one professor who made an impact on me? It makes me wonder then if we are starting to think this way in elementary and high schools, how do we convince our post secondary compatriots that this kind of thinking is more beneficial than writing an expository essay about 17th century English literature or taking a multiple choice exam about psychology theories?

My other question on the focus of passion based learning is how do we convince everyone else that encouraging the pursuit of passion is relevant and acceptable for our curriculum? I know there are many teachers who would say that students need to be learning “certain” content and that passions like hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, and farming have no place in an English classroom. In fact, I had that fight in my English class in teacher’s college. I had an argument with another girl over her view that all students need to read Shakespeare and “good” literature and that texts like magazine articles and “grocery store novels” are not acceptable reading material for class. One of my questions back to her was how can we judge what others want to read? Who decides what is “good” literature? I actually thought a lot of the “good” literature I read in university was crap and can’t fathom trying to engage some of my students in those texts when I, an English major, thought they were terrible. My other question for her was how can we paint all our students with the same brush and teach everyone the exact same content? Where does differentiated learning fit in her equation? I asked her how she was going to engage her students who had difficulty with reading comprehension and understanding complex writing and her response was, “they will learn it because I will teach it.” I often think about her and wonder if she’s changed any of her views on education after being in a real classroom or if she’s still up on her soap box…

So ultimately my question is, how do YOU think we facilitate this change? I would love any feedback, comments or suggestions on this conundrum.

Yesterday my husband and I hosted the annual Reaburn Christmas at our home. My dad’s side of the family is quite varied in terms of career paths ranging from my uncle who is a very successful business man to my cousin who is a very talented farmer with a couple of bankers, an interior decorator and of course a few teachers thrown in for good measure.  With that mix, we always have good discussions and on many occasions, the talk invariably makes its way to teaching.

Last night it was actually me who brought up teaching (which is unusual since I try to avoid shop talk on holidays) but I’ve been having an on-going issue trying to engage a boy in my grade nine class. He is of the opinion that he doesn’t need English class because he’s going to be a farmer for life and since he can speak English, he thinks he’s set. I’ve been trying all kinds of approaches to get him to see the importance of being able to communicate effectively and comprehend what he’s reading, but the student really doesn’t feel that my class is important or relevant to his life so I decided to ask my cousin, the farmer. My cousin is quite intelligent and a very shrewd business man, but I remember from high school that English class was not something he enjoyed. My cousin’s suggestion was to talk to him about what he knows and if that means I need to learn about hunting, fishing and farming, then that’s what I have to do. He also said that something he hated about his high school English teachers was that he felt they didn’t respect him as a person or believe that he was intelligent just because he didn’t particularly participate or complete all the work assigned. It makes me sad to hear that a member of my profession can have such a negative impact on a student. It was a good lesson in remembering compassion and respect for other strengths and abilities in students and just that small conversation has caused me to reflect a little more on my classroom practice.

The other really thought provoking part of the evening came from a comment by my grandfather. He is a retired elementary principal and while my cousin and I were discussing the issue with my student, he was listening and reflecting back on his days in administration. Grandpa then told me that when he was a principal, he spent many frustrated hours arguing with secondary principals and teachers about the importance of providing proper education to students who were not planning on attending post secondary. He said that many secondary teachers, in his day, did not see the value in providing education tailored to those students who were heading to the world of work in jobs such as farming or the trades. His comments have had me thinking all day. Has education really not changed that much in the last fifty years? Are we still not doing enough to make education relevant to all our students? What can we do to help these students and how do we show them that they are important members of society and that we respect them? It’s definitely food for thought, but I’m glad to know that I come from a lineage of teachers who fight for their students and are motivated to seek change in our practice.

In the last two months, I have attended a great deal of professional development events and it has definitely caused me to rethink my teaching practice. The professional development has had more of a technology in education focus, but on Monday of this past week, I attended a board wide professional development day centered on the Ontario Literacy Class. It is a class for students who have twice failed our provincial standardized literacy test, but who still want to graduate with their diploma. For many of the students in this class, it is their “ticket out” of school and thus, there is a lot riding on this course in Ontario secondary schools.

At the meeting, I was really impressed with my colleagues. Kim, our fearless leader, ( @KimMcGill ) has really been pushing us to think about what learning “looks like” and what our assessments should “look like.” Until this year, I hadn’t thought about learning and teaching as what it should look like, but Kim is helping to change my philosophy of teaching. It makes me think of my teaching as if my students were watching a tv show or movie. If I was to stand back and watch my classroom in motion, what would it look like and what would the actors and actresses being doing? It has really made me stop and conceptualize my classroom as visual rather than linear.

One of my other colleagues, Laurie, ( @laurcrai ) demonstrated some of the best teacher modeling I have seen in my career. She shared a lesson that she had created using Smart Board Notebook Software about how to teach students to express an opinion. She used brainstorming techniques so that the students would think about what an opinion is and how to express it, then followed it up with an interactive lesson where she and the students worked together to write an opinion as a group. What was really special about this activity is that Laurie engaged the students by using a topic relevant to their lives, had the students actively participate in the lesson, worked together as a group to help the class write, then had them go off and work on their own then carried out at least one conference with each student. It was a complete demonstration of the gradual release of responsibility model by Fisher and Frey which was really great to see in action!

The meeting then had me reflect back on my own practice. We were thinking about this model in terms of the OLC class, but what does it look like in my other classes? I then took this thought and applied it to my grade nine English class. I have a very techie group of grade nine students and even though we are doing a novel study right now, we spend almost the whole week in the computer lab. One of the tasks we have traditionally employed for this unit is a journal writing component. The students are to think like one of the characters in the novel and write journal entries as if they were that character or write a response to the character. Using the concept of teacher modeling and the gradual release of responsibility as motivation, I have been creating my own exemplars for the students. Also, instead of having my students “journal,” I gave it a 21st century spin and we are blogging. I also wanted the students to incorporate media by embedding or hyper-linking and modeled that in my exemplar. Finally, we have been discussing meaningful feedback as well, and so as a group, we criticized and praised my initial draft so the feedback you will see as comments on my exemplar have actually come from my students. You can view the exemplar here.

Since this is an on-going, evolving and reflective experience for me as a teacher, I would love any comments, suggestions, opinions, etc. Thanks!

The slogan of the ECOO conference this year was “Inspire, Connect, Teach” and I have to say, the conference sure delivered on all three fronts!

Inspire – I had the pleasure of attending three amazing sessions that had me enraptured!

Alec Couros – I have been following Alec on Twitter for about eight months now and so I knew I had to take the opportunity to hear him speak in person when I could. He spoke on Social Media and what he had to say really struck a cord with me being as I teach media studies at LDSS. He spoke about such topics as offensive content in the media, misinformation, scams and hoaxes, safety and cyberbullying, social networks, and civic/political/cultural engagement. What I really enjoyed about his presentation is that he showed us examples of all these topics but then proceeded to discuss this in terms of what we as teachers can with these topics in our classrooms. I also really appreciated how he took a positive spin on social media. I often feel that too often when people discuss social media it has a negative slant and Alec suggested that it’s here to stay and we are the ones who need to help students navigate these waters appropriately.

Alec also gave the closing keynote and yet again his message for to the group was that social media can be a really positive aspect of our lives. I especially love what he said about professional development. He suggests that every morning when you wake up, you have access to professional development through the internet and Twitter but it’s up to you to engage in these opportunities. I hadn’t thought about that idea before and I think that is one of the reasons that I have Tweetdeck on as often as possible.

Ben Hazzard – He is actually the reason I joined Twitter in the first place and when I found out he was presenting at ECOO, I knew I had to meet him in person and hear his message. In talking with Ben, it is obvious that he has a passion for teaching, but also to help people and for his master’s in education, he created a website called “Teachers Connecting” . The website is a place for teachers to register and then find other teachers all over the world so that they may engage in classroom collaboration projects. The idea is truly fantastic and inspiring and really emphasizes that teachers need other teachers and the website works as a moderator to allow teachers to find other teachers.

While in Ben’s session, I was sitting at a table with Doug Sadler and Mary Kay Goindi and we were inspired to discuss collaboration. From this conversation, Doug and I have made a collaboration plan. He teaches in the Windsor Essex Catholic District School Board and they have a wonderful program running where their grade twelve students create videos about such issues as digital footprints, safe internet browsing, social networking, netiquette, cyberbullying, and many more which they then go around and present to the grade eight classes in their area. (You can access their website from here.) I was so inspired by this idea that I asked if we could do the same projects in my EMS 30 (Grade 11 English Media Studies) and from there we have formed a collaboration project involving some kind of video conferencing between our classes and the sharing of resources. I think it will be great motivation for my students to see what others are doing in their community and for them to work with a class three hours away! I really am super excited for this project and I think sometimes things are just meant to be.

iEARN – This presentation was definitely very heartwarming and you could see from the presenters, Jim and Mali, it is a project that is very dear to their hearts. The idea behind the iEARN project is that you register on their website and find a project to do with another class across the world. Jim and Mali discussed projects that they had completed with people in Africa and Japan and it was obvious that all the work and time that went into this project has given them a renewed passion for teaching. I was also really touched by their discussion of peace. In that project that discussed what peace means here in Canada and then were able to see images and text from students in Pakistan and Iran sharing their thoughts about peace. It was heart-wrenching knowing that what we have here in Canada is so amazing and that even though that’s not necessarily the reality for those students, at least they still have hope.

Connect – By far and away, one of the best aspects of the conference!

Twitter has become a staple in my life and even though some people believe you can’t develop meaningful relationships with others over the internet, I truly believe you can and Thursday night was the perfect example! On Thursday night, Brenda Sherry organized a “Tweetup” where all us Twitterers got together for a face to face social gathering. It was such an amazing experience as I was in the same room with all these people that I converse with in a virtual setting. I had some amazing conversations with people who know a lot about me without ever having spoken a word with them. We shared jokes, stories, and ideas and it was like I have known these people for a really long time. I also laughed harder than I have in a long time about topics outside of education (far, far outside for my rural friends…

The most amazing part though of meeting these Twitter friends in person is the realization that we all share a common passion for our students and want to make the lives and classroom experiences the best possible. In this group of friends, I have found such a strong support network and the desire to inspire change. Change in our daily classroom practice, change in our approaches, and hopefully a change in thinking in terms of skills and ideas related to education. I’ve often heard that education is the last to adapt and interacting with these wonderful people yesterday has given me a renewed hope for our education system.

Finally, in terms of connecting, a group of us returned home from the conference and immediately turned on Twitter and engaged in even more dialogue and begun discussing next year’s ECOO conference. I think that speaks to Brenda Sherry’s leadership and positivity that one of the first things we did when we returned home was to start speaking about when we can get together again and what we can do next year! I think it also speaks to a core passion when Colin Jagoe was sitting across town thinking of how we could all be together rather than in separate parts of the GTA. From all this enthusiasm, I’m so excited for what comes next!

Teach – and teach it did!

To me, I was taught so much in one day that I can’t begin to even explain how much my head is still buzzing (even after this blog post!) and that there is so much more excitement and sharing of ideas to come! I also feel that being together with such a group of exemplary teachers has motivated me to really assess my classroom practice and think reflect even further on the fact that it’s not the technology that is important, it’s the teaching. I think that message rang loud and clear through this conference and even though we had the opportunity to see a lot of cool and exciting products, we still have to remember that what we as the teachers with the technology as a tool is far more important.

In closing, thanks again to Brenda Sherry and Peter Skillen for an absolutely amazing conference and I’m really excited for our future collaborations!

The last few weeks have been very motivating for me as an educator. I have had the opportunity to learn from Will Richardson as well as network with many other technology-minded educators here in Ontario and I just feel so inspired! It is so amazing to meet other teachers who feel as I do about technology and are dealing with some of the same issues that I face in trying to incorporate technology into the classroom.

I feel really strongly that integrating technology into the classroom is good pedagogical practice as our students already live in a wired world and will be then working in a wired world. We need to be teaching them how to navigate cyberspace as well as how to be strong collaborators and critical thinkers. Too often I think we are focussing on rote memorization where that skill is going to be useless in the future (and in my opinion already is!) instead of teaching them to take their phone out of their pocket and use it to find the facts (as Will Richardson says).

Another aspect we need to be considering is the idea of allowing our students to use their cell phones in the classroom. Last week I observed a girl in my class collaborating on a task with others take out her cell phone, send a text and go right back to work. Cell phone use is banned in our school board; however, I think we need to revisit that policy. I believe that if I had reprimanded that girl for having her cell phone out, she would have gotten distracted from her original task and not been as engaged as she was for the rest of the class. I am also skeptical of this policy as I myself don’t particularly text that much; however, I am an avid Twitterer. I often have Tweetdeck running while I am working and frequently check the incoming tweets as well as send out some of my own while doing other work. How can I justify disciplining her behaviour when I see my own behaviour mirroring hers? I try to avoid running a hypocritical classroom and even though the students might be unaware of my Twitter habit, I still feel that it’s important for me to maintain freedom from cognitive dissonance.

Finally, I just wanted to post a 21st century task my students have created for the eInstruction Classroom Makeover Contest. The contest requires students to take an existing song and make a parody of it while demonstrating the use of technology in the classroom. I teach in a rural school board so a Taylor Swift parody was a perfectly engaging challenge for them. The beauty of this creation is that the students displayed such 21st century skills as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and synthesizing. I can’t help but feel a sense of pride in my students for their awesome product!

Enjoy!

For most of us connected in cyberspace, Twitter is one of our main modes of communication and this past week, I answered the request of a fellow Twitterer. @WillyB (Ben Wildeboer) sent out a message asking if any of his PLN would be willing to do a shout-out about technology in education for a presentation. I answered his call and I thought that I would post it here on my blog. Enjoy!

The past two weeks have been some of the most inspiring for me as a teacher. I have had the privilege of hearing Will Richardson speak on two separate occasions and my eyes have been opened and my creative juices are flowing. Will spoke of having students create texts for a global audience and that concept really speaks to me. I think students live in a virtual world where they are constantly putting themselves out there in cyberspace (sometimes in a way that makes us cringe) and by allowing them the same avenue in their school work, I think the levels of engagement in the classroom have nowhere to go but up.

After hearing Will speak for the first time, I took that message back to my grade nine English class and ran with it. We decided to create a video for the ECOO Multimedia Conference Contest celebrating the concept of citizenship. Our school board has a major focus on character education and allowing them to create a video that would be seen by people all over Canada (and the world too since I put it on Twitter) really allowed my students to complete their best work of the semester. They worked together to create a concept that would resonate with everyone yet show their own interpretation and I couldn’t be more proud of their accomplishment! If you would like to see the video, it is available here.

Over the past weekend I attended the OTF technology conference held in Toronto where I was able to face to face network with some of my Ontario Educator PLN as well be even more inspired. It was so great to be in a room full of educators who have a passion for technology in education and I am still buzzing with excitement from the weekend. I have brought this excitement home with me and was able to inspire some of my students with a technology based idea. We are taking a popular song “You Belong With Me” by Taylor Swift and are changing the lyrics to reflect our thoughts on technology. The students are then going to videotape and edit a parody of her music video which we are then going to enter in a contest. The contest is open to classrooms all over the world and they are so excited about the possibility of it going viral. They really love the idea that something they are going to create will be put on the web and accessible by anyone. A couple of them have even asked if they can post it on their Facebook pages because they are already anticipating that they are going to do an awesome job.

After seeing the motivation, enthusiasm and laughter that has been taking place in my classroom over the last few weeks, I can’t feel anything but inspired. Many people in our profession seem to view technology as the enemy and I really wish they could understand that these are the realities of our students. They don’t learn like we did (personally, I didn’t like how we learned anyway) and if we could just speak their language, we are going to get so much more. I am hoping that with the media creations we are seeing come out of classrooms, that the students themselves will be able to persuade the naysayers to see the light…

Please feel free to post comments or feedback.

The past week has been a rather unfortunate but enlightening one for myself and another teacher. The unfortunate part is that I was not able to work for four days as I was dealing with an illness. (I think I’ve taken a total of four days off in my entire career before this week so that lets you know the extent…) The redeeming quality of the whole situation; however, came though from  the supply teacher my school chose to bring in for me.

The school made the best possible choice in person to bring in for my absence this week. She is a supply teacher who has done some previous work at our school and therefore I knew she happens to be a tech geek like me. (She is also a Mac user which is awesome!) On the first day she was there, she sent me an email saying she had turned on the Smart Board and was using it even though I hadn’t left that as part of my lesson and therefore I knew I could leave her anything to do with my classes that I would have normally done myself. I can’t tell you how much a relief that was to me as I am someone who is often riddled with guilt when I feel that I’m letting others down (especially my students!)

On the second day, I emailed her my lesson plans which used the Smart Board and my wiki extensively in each class. Even before I got her email updating me on the day, I knew that my lessons were in good hands and that everything was getting completed. When I got her email, the first line was “The wiki/Smart Board are pretty much the greatest things ever!” She is absolutely right too! I was able to create wiki pages for each of my classes outlining what they were to accomplish for the day and she was then able to facilitate the directions in the class.

On the third day, I even had a couple of challenges put forth for one of my classes and they used the internet to search out some ideas. I also was happy that I was able to insert some of my presence through the wiki as when I created the pages, I included my somewhat wacky sense of humour. It also worked well as one of the tasks asked my students to go home and have a discussion with their parents and even though I was not present, by having the wiki with my personal stamp, the students actually went home and had the talk with their parents. It was great too as when I was back yesterday, the students still remembered the lesson from Wednesday and wanted to discuss the topic in class! To me, that is a success as the students were engaged through the wiki and the supply teacher and still wanted to continue the discussion with me.

One of our school’s new professional mantras is “Make Friends With a Wiki” and I really can’t say enough about its use in the classroom! It really aided me when being off and in only three weeks of school, I’m finding my students are really appreciating all its many uses! I think it also needs to be said that I’m really thankful my school chose this particular teacher to fill in for me as she embraced the technology in my classroom and ran with it! I can say with certainty that I did not expect my third week of school to happen this way, but I’m glad that I was able to share my wiki with this teacher and that she had the opportunity to experience a different style of teaching (even if it wasn’t under the best circumstances…) So if you have some time, follow our school’s suggestion and “Make Friends With a Wiki!”