Hooking Them In!

I'm a big believer in hooking students in to learning. I think it's worth spending time to create something engaging that will hopefully hook their imagination, excitement, curiosity or something inside students so they want to learn more.

Tomorrow I launch a new inquiry around the choices that preteens and teenagers make in their day to day lives. The grade 6 students I'm working with will end up creating infographics that will promote healthy choices.

We will start by watching the following video.

Then we will look at a few symbols and discuss them in the presentation below.

I am also going to make a conscious effort to give the students plenty of time to think and THEN talk. I am going to say very little throughout this task. I want to listen their ideas so I can shape the lessons to follow.

Designing Icons, Thinking Visually

After a meeting with a colleague this week, I have been thinking more about how I can make my thinking more visible. I would love to bring this in to my teaching more as well. I wonder if all students will benefit from this?

Visual thinking is certainly different than writing down all information. It requires the brain to think a little differently. I'm a very visual thinker. I often think and make connections with things that I have seen or by drawing something to get a better picture of it. I have enjoyed sketchnoting and drawing notes of keynotes and ideas I have come across in my work. I haven't done it as much as I would have liked and would love to make more time to draw. I am currently trying to think more visually. 

This weekend, a group of colleagues have challenged each other to sketch an icon that you haven't used before. I pushed it a little further. I designed an icon for 'evidence capture' as that has been I have been focusing on this week (see note below). My icon consists of four other icons brought into one and represents what it means to gather evidence of learning.

This is my entry in this weekend's #sketchdown. We document learning, we have conversations, we record video and voice to capture learning in different ways.  

In my work this week I have been all about gathering evidence. At this time of the year we are thinking back to work we have done and we start reflecting on how effective how work has been. We also want to share that reflection with others and also celebrate our successes. I have begun recording evidence of learning this year as we have focused on literacy throughout the year. We have come to learn that I this first year of this focus, we have realized that we have probably focused more on reading and writing literacy. We now need to move into more discipline based literacy. This will be an exciting shift as everyone, in their own discipline, will be able to focus on what it means to be literate in Math, or Science, or Music, or in PhysEd.

Sketchnote: Design Thinking

Here's my entry :) @mordenthis #designthinking #10minutesketchnote #20minutesreally #madewithpaper pic.twitter.com/WxHWDvjg1k

— Steve Clark  (@stevewclark) May 7, 2016

Blogging: DC & the Importance of Respect

To me, one of the most important things to remember when you are blogging is that everyone has different ideas and opinions. While it OK for me to disagree with someone, I still need to remember to respect their opinion.

When we share our own ideas with other people it often helps us understand that idea in a better way. By describing what we think about something we often have to think about other perspectives that are out there. When someone disagrees with my opinion, it often makes me think of other ideas, or perspectives. Sometimes its hard to take/read/listen to other opinions but I need to remember that it’s ok for others to disagree and that we’re all entitled to share our own thinking.

It would be great to get some feedback from this post. I am working with a group of grade 4 students and we are learning about the purpose of comments and engaging with other people's blog posts.

I wonder how other people feel when their ideas are challenged?

What is Fair?

Image: Unknown original source - This from a post from Joe Bower

Today I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with Damian Cooper, author of Redefining Fair. A book that is about planning, assessment and grading. What a great topic to read and learn more about in today's education climate. In Alberta right now there is so much talk about Education and curriculum and what this is going to look like in the (near) future. We are in the midst of a curriculum redesign where the government is committed to completely revamping the K-12 curriculum so it matches and works for tomorrows students. There is so much talk (some good and some bad) about what good learning and teaching looks like. The public are talking a lot about math and what that should look like in the classroom. There has also been a lot of buzz about no-zero policies and academic awards in junior and senior high schools. 

Today's session was aimed at what we should be doing in the classroom, meeting the needs of our students. It was about the things we do and say to our students. The tasks we ask of our students and how they are assessed. It was about how we should be using the curriculum despite what most educators feel they should do.

Cooper talks about 5 main imperatives. I find these to be very much in-line with Alberta's Teacher Effectiveness Framework by Sharon Friesen. Cooper's take on these are as follows:

1. Curriculum must be meaningful, coherent and relevant
2. Instruction must be responsive to students’ needs
3. Assessment must be informative
4. Grading must blend consistency with professional judgement
5. Communication about learning must be truthful and transparent

The main points that I took away from today's workshop can be captured in the following Storify:

Personalization

I saw this tweet from Davis Truss (@datruss) this morning and it resonated with me.  It shows three great metaphors of what good learning and teaching looks like. I think these are the things we're trying to do to help change education for the better! And what's best is that they're all student focused!

Metaphors to create greater Educational Flexibility (post: http://t.co/m2oRqxL16L ) pic.twitter.com/woT0r2dOuR
— David Truss (@datruss) April 10, 2014

Let's Do it!

I've been thinking a lot this week about sharing. In our School district, we are a little behind the eight-ball. Here is a message I wrote on our CBEILT Google+ community page tonight.

Ok #YYCBE educators - Let get the positive message out there! It's time we teachers took control of our hashtag and started sharing the amazing things we are doing in our classrooms and schools.

Here's 4 simple ways we can do it!

1. Document your story (anything from 140 characters or more through a blog post or image)
2. Share it on the CBEILT Google+ Community and on Twitter (if you're not on Twitter, then you need to be!) and add the #yycbe hashtag
3. Search the #YYCBE hashtag - Look for positive stories - modify and/or retweet those stories
4. Retweet great articles and stories you find elsewhere and add the #yycbe hashtag
5. Please note - if you modify a tweet or add something else, the orginal author will be notified and can then retweet too, which in-turn will continue to build more momentum!

This last week has been amazing! We are already starting to push those negative stories further and further down the newsfeed! Let's keep it up and build momentum!