mindfully thinking about learning
When I first started commuting, I ended up at the Barrie Go Station to find this great innovative idea for book sharing that was setup close to the train tracks. The definition of innovation is to improve on something, and if you’re a lover of public libraries, like me, you’ll love this idea.
It was such an honour this month to attend a celebration of many of the wonderful, courageous or accomplished women in Guelph who contribute to the development of youth and the community!
It was an exciting night, so well organized by they YMCA/YWCA, and contributing to a fantastic program that I’d never heard about called TAPPS in support of young parents and their children. I was thrilled to contribute to this wonderful cause and it turned out that I was the lucky recipient of the award in the category of Information Technology! Although Steve and the kids were not able to be there that night, it was great to have my parents there with me! 
I’m not one for liking being the centre of attention, and I didn’t know what was to come when I agreed to let my nominators Kim Kowch and Andrew Cloutier put forward my name. They went ahead in the background and gathered letters of support from colleagues and friends and sent all this in to the nominating committee. I haven’t seen those letters, but I know that it was a lot of work and I’m grateful to both of them and the people that I’m aware contributed: Mary-Kay Goindi, Peter Skillen and Cathy Novosad. It was delightful to be recognized, and I want to thank Andrew and Kim, as well as my supporters who attended the gala evening, for their part in this!
This kind of event certainly reminded me of the importance of contributing to the community and the impact that each of us can have. The night was filled with stories of amazing women inspiring and helping others through the arts, education, research, business, science and volunteerism. I’ve always been more involved in school community and in the global community of educators but this program has piqued my interest about some of the other ways I might contribute to our amazing Guelph community!
I’m always looking for ways we can use technology to amplify current practices to make them more powerful or to become more innovative – to do things we couldn’t do before. While working on a PD session for some teachers last week, I came across this video of a first year teacher who used Google Forms to connect with her students on a personal level – and from where they were most comfortable – using their digital tools.
Many people are critical of the role technology plays in keeping us disconnected from others, but this is a powerful example of how technology can support those f2f relationships.
Thanks to Facilitators for Excellent Minds On Media at ECOO12
We want to thank, and to celebrate, the facilitators at Educational Computing Organization of Ontario’s Minds On Media event held on Wednesday, October 24th.
This year we had a full house of 120 participants and 9 centres! It was a hive of activity and the energy was phenomenal.
We heard many wonderful comments throughout the day, but one we overheard was a teacher saying to her colleague, “I have learned more in the last three hours than I’ve learned in years!”
Another teacher was seen to be leaving the event after an hour, laptop in hand, and we were discouraged! But, she said to us, “Wow! I’ve learned so much I am going to find a quiet spot to put it into practice. I’ll be back!” And she did return – hungry for more!
Minds On Media (MOM) is a model of professional learning that respects the learner’s ‘desire to know’. Teachers come to learn and we respect their choices in how they wish to do that. We want them to take a ‘minds on’ approach.
We believe that:
Facilitators at MOM sessions look forward to, not only teaching but, learning with others. They respect the knowledge and expertise that each person brings to the table.
Pedagogistas are there to ensure that we don’t get lost in the mechanics of the tools – but rather remind and support us to think deeply about the role of technology in learning and teaching.
Most sincerely,
Brenda Sherry
Peter Skillen
Most days, I’m really upbeat. I go into schools, I give workshops, I help kids and teachers, and at the end of the day I feel that I’ve been successful in helping someone shift their practice and perhaps try some new things that will ultimately give students a wider variety of learning experiences.
Most of the time, it’s not actually about tools, but it’s about celebrating good practice. So when I was at a school today and seeing all kinds of purposeful play in kindergarten and primary grades, would I have suggested putting students behind a screen? No way! Would I have wanted teachers to capture these learning moments digitally to be archived, shared with parents or developed into stories that students could revisit? You bet!
And then I saw this. I’m trying to help a teacher get a Smartboard going. He believes it may not be working, but actually he just needs a really long VGA cord because the outlet is in a very awkward spot along the side of the room, crowded with some other attachments. I look up, and see that a LCD 
projector has been mounted in the ceiling about 2 feet out from (and in the way of) a big television screen that is also wall mounted. My mouth literally dropped open. Who on earth would have thought that was a good idea?
Honestly, it’s even hard for upbeat me to see electricians deciding how teachers will teach, non-users of technology buying technology, deciding (with apparent lack of logic) where it will go and therefore impacting teachers and students forever after (or so it seems).
Once again I quote my friend Peter Skillen, who says, “It’s like the illiterate, telling the literate what to read.” Seriously folks, just how long is it going to take for us to get this right?
Whew! I’ve returned from a whirlwind of 3 days of learning at OTF’s latest conference: Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century and as usual, my brain is full of new learning, not only from the keynote presenters, Will Richardson and Garfield Gini-Newman, but from my own network. I’m a little late getting to this post so I’m going highlight some of the folks who’ve provided multiple perspectives on their experience…special thanks to Peter Skillen who made this such an awesome event! If you aren’t reading these blogs you should really be adding them to your blogroll – they do a great job of capturing the event. Others you will find to be a source of professional learning on twitter so check them out!
It’s incredible to stand among these folks who are so generous in sharing their expertise and supporting others. There are so many others in my network that weren’t able to be here for one reason or another, but I am constantly grateful to all of you for the things you teach me and others around the province and beyond. These are really good times to be a teacher!
There were some folks who couldn’t be with us (registration filled up really quickly) and we even heard from some of you who were attending virtually on Twitter. Erin, we will get together again one of these days!
Thanks again to OTF for another wonderful conference about Teaching and Learning. It has been inspiring to watch the PLN grow over the last two years and to see folks nurturing our new members on twitter and other kinds of social media was really rewarding. There’s a reason we are all educators – we are ridiculously enthusiastic about life-long learning!
In October I was taking part in OTF’s Critical Thinking Conference with teachers of all subject areas and grades who are new to the Critical Thinking Framework as defined by the Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2). Garfield Gini-Newman was the lead presenter, along with some other TC2 folk, and my colleague Peter Skillen and I are involved in providing additional on-going professional learning support to OTF members through the facilitation of Elluminate sessions online. We’ll be facilitating sessions throughout the year in the hopes of allowing teachers to continue the Critical Thinking conversation.
Our first webinar was this week and we had a really engaged group of people attend who were gracious enough to participate and share what they are doing in their classrooms…this made it a great session!
We are trying to nurture a supportive online community of teachers who are interested in improving their practice around strategies for critical thinking. In our first session, Peter and I brought a couple of ideas for elementary school lessons related to exploring the conventions and techniques of television advertising, and using open-ended questions to help deconstruct media from the Centre for Media Literacy.
We are defining Critical Thinking as:
We are also assuming that a person is thinking critically only if he/she is attempting to assess and judge the merits of possible options in light of relevant factors or criteria. When learning the critical thinking framework from TC2, we focus on designing critical challenges like the following:
In the past I’ve explored tv advertising by having students watch this great movie about conventions and techniques and then having them analyze some commercials using a recording sheet that includes the possible conventions and techniques you’ll see here:
http://mediaeducationlab.com/tv-smarts-how-do-they-make-things-look-so-good
In order to bring this into the realm of critical thinking, we did what Gini-Newman would call ‘tweaking’ the lesson. They still watched the short film and analyzed a few commercials to become familiar with the concepts and vocabulary, and to gather some background knowledge about television advertising, but then we moved on to have students set their own criteria for what makes a good tv advertisement and they came up with the following:
1. persuasive pictures and words
2. some knowledge and information about the product/service
3. believable
4. commercial needs to fit the audience
5. catches your eye (hooks you in)
6. using techniques well (conventions of tv advertising)
We then watched a few commercials to see if our criteria fit well. Were we able to assess the commercials using the criteria we had created? Did we need to change anything?
We then used a ‘judge the better or best’ critical challenge to go further. The students imagined that they had been hired by Gatorade to help them with their recent ad campaign. Gatorade had created two commercials, and the students were asked to assess the commercials using their criteria and decide which one should be selected to air on tv and the reasons for their decision.
Here are the two commercials:
You can see our other Media Literacy resources here at Tech2Learn and our next OTF Webinar is Secondary Media Literacy on Nov. 24 at 8:00 pm EST. A primary session on Thoughtful Books will follow on Dec. 1st.
I’ve just come up for air after an amazing three days facilitating a Digital Storytelling Camp for the Ontario Teacher’s Federation and as a member of the ECOO Subject Association. I was really excited to have 3 days to work with teachers, a nice change from my usual after school workshop scenarios and looking forward to working with my colleague, Peter Skillen, who is always a gracious and hard-working co-presenter who I am constantly learning from.
It was a rewarding group of just over 30 enthusiastic teachers, most of whom were beginners to technology, and certainly to Digital Storytelling. This meant a constant stream of either whole group facilitation or one-to-one assistance from Peter and me…thank goodness we worked together…neither of us would have managed it very well all alone! 🙂 Our two twitter friends @dougpete and @kellmoor, who were using the lab the week before us, also filled us in about what the lab settings would be like, which was very much appreciated. We met a friend from Twitter, Christina (@ChrisRzazewski )….that is always so cool when that happens unexpectedly. 
What a reminder for me though, about what the classroom teacher experiences every day, all year long. As a technology coach, I’m in a number of schools each week (usually two per day) and I’m well aware that this is not the “real deal” of teaching that class of students every day, all year long. I was humbled by the patience of these teachers to wait for us to help and to be so flexible when things didn’t work out quite the way we had wanted.
There were things I would have liked to have done better. It would have been nicer to have more laptops in attendance, so that we could have used Frames 4 instead of MovieMaker which has its own set of challenges. If we’d known that McMaster would have put software on the labs for us, it would have been nice to have Audacity on every machine so that multiple audio tracks would have been easier to make. After a projector bulb blew and we relocated, we found that the sound was poor in the new lab and there was no usb access on the presentation computer…glitches that made culminating with sharing their amazing stories a bit of a challenge to say the least.
All in all though, teachers seemed to be happy with what they had learned, and I left feeling humbled and reminded that these amazing teachers have incredibly busy days meeting the needs of all of the individuals in their classes and all the other things that I don’t include in my teaching day: milk money, bulletin boards, parents, yard duty, field trip forms…you get the idea…all of the extras that take so much time and energy, never mind planning fantastic learning environments and keeping a handle on assessment!
Next week, Social Media Camp in Toronto! 🙂
The E-Call for proposals has been out for a while for the 2010 Educational Computing Organization’s 31st Conference: Inspire, Connect, Learn and I’ve been doing some tapping on shoulders lately…in fact, if I haven’t gotten around to YOU yet…consider yourself tapped upon! 
These days I’m feeling very fortunate to have such a rich and varied PLN, especially for the past year during which time I’ve been more involved in Twitter than ever before. Having had the chance to experience Educon for the first time and take part in the Critical Thinking Consortium‘s workshops sponsored by OTF, I’m realizing that there are so many educators doing great things in classrooms and in communities of practice both on and offline around the province. One of the best things about being part of the ECOO Conference Committee is trying to see the big picture and play a part in selecting the kinds of presenters and events that might appeal to teachers just like ourselves.
We don’t have to look very far. Sure, we need to bring in a couple of big names (hang on…we’ll be announcing them soon). They offer a new perspective, inspiring all of us who are committed to the benefits of technology in our own learning and teaching practice (and especially for our students), but we need to also provide sessions for the smaller breakout rooms. These sessions do something just as important and perhaps even more lasting. They connect our conference delegates in a more informal way to new ideas, new approaches, and sometimes just to discussions about some of the celebrations and challenges of technology enhanced teaching that is embedded in classroom practice.
After realizing that the most interesting educators I know are right here under my nose, the next thing that I’ve come to realize is that teachers often don’t feel that what they are doing is worthy of sharing. How wrong they are! We want to have a focus on classroom practice that can be transformed by, among other things, technology. We want to celebrate and share the kinds of things teachers are experimenting with and reflecting upon as we continue this journey towards better learning environments for our students, be they virtual or bricks and mortar!
So please, I urge you to consider sharing your insights about learning with technology at ECOO 2010 and submit a proposal. Not only is it a great way to inspire, connect and learn with other Ontario educators interested in technology use, but we’ll thank you with a free registration for the day and a wonderful lunch!
“It is the peculiarity of knowledge that those who really thirst for it always get it.” Richard Jefferies
Regardless of whether technology is in the picture or not, I’ve been wondering about deep understanding: what is it, and is it a goal we can actually realize in our schools these days? Sheryl Naussbaum-Beach did a great keynote at ABEL last week and mentioned how much knowledge will be generated over the coming years and the facts really blow your mind. There is no way, in a time when knowledge is growing at such an exponential rate, that we’ll be able to keep up with curriculum that is relevant and comprehensive enough to serve our students. Or can we?
I keep coming back to the kind of thinker we’d like to see graduating from our schools after a dozen or so years with us. That’s a practical vision we CAN have in the face of enormously fast paced change.
Especially in the face of ubiquitous access to information, it seems that we’ll need students who can manage large quantities of information, but still be able to reach deep understanding in some areas.
But what is deep understanding? Can schools really provide the learning environment to nurture and develop it?
Can we see evidence of deep understanding or does it occur only in the inner world of the learner?
Our challenge as educators is that we are given the task of showing evidence of this kind of thinking, and the kinds of assessment needed to allow the demonstration of deep understanding are not easy to create (that’s another subject altogether). Here’s what I look for:
I wish I was seeing more student involvement in learning in our schools. There appear to be very few interesting or unique or student-driven questions being explored, and I wonder about whether new knowledge is being constructed.
In thinking about the ways that I might keep deep understanding at the forefront when I’m planning my teaching I’ve come up with these:
Technology fits quite naturally as one of the tools a teacher might use to support the quest for deeper learning, but as you can see the technology is not at the forefront. I don’t think it’s helpful to name specific ‘tools’ as so many come to mind to those who’ve been around the cyber-block a few times. No wonder we embrace technology…it has the potential to help students towards thinking deeply!
