Teachers staying connected with teachers

John Evans from Maple was this week's classroom guest. 

John reminds us through his humourous slides, that maintaining a sense of humour and taking care of ourselves are both very important to keep in mind as teachers. I have mitigated diligently against this problem with a very nice thermos for tea and a separate one for coffee...
I do not intend in becoming one of the statistics of dropping out of teaching in the first 5 years in the field. It took me quite a few years to 'get' the self care piece by learning the hard way again and again. Now I practice yoga regularly most mornings, eat a healthy diet, remember my vitamins and minerals, receive gratitude and affirmation reminders from Keith Macpherson and work on getting adequate sleep. I won't always get it right, but I try my best everyday. This is the foundation for being an effective teacher in the long run. Did you catch the part where he said there is life beyond marking? A great message to hear, especially since I know I will be teaching an ELA class in my next term.

Listening to the talk furthur, I made the magical discovery of how my crafty interests align with Makerspace at this week's presentation from John Evans. It was just perfect the dose of fresh interest for me! I learned that it is possible to mesh my crafty side of sewing, knitting, and generally any hands on creating. Makerspace is where everybody is a maker - crafts, lego, playdo, parachute rope braclets, weaving etc. - What is learned while crafting applies to education. People start sharing, learning about life, and building trust. To me this aligns so nicely with the Circle of Courage - Generosity, Independence, Belonging, and Mastery that is brought up as part of the teachings in some Indigeneous cultures. It also was a focus in a very smart talk I attended in December given by Kevin Lamoureaux. He is someone whose career is worth following as a teacher in Manitoba. Here is a link to a one page bio that describes his background and involvement in education.
http://www.trcm.ca/public-education/speakers-bureau/speakers-bureau-member-profiles/kevin-lamoureux/ . I am also following him on twitter. @KevinLamoureux
Maker space is for me and for students who may not feel successful at other things that school has to offer. It is a different pathway to learning, power of choice, power of engagement, students are agents of their own learning and it gives them the power of a lifetime of learning. Can't beat that!
Now where did I leave those almost finished slippers I started before the Ed program began?

Tech Task #2 - Curation

This is the snapshot of where I am at today with curation in the spirit of documenting growth. My main takeaway for Curation is that it allows for a level of confidence in teaching and sharing. I am able to keep track of the tools I use or the videos I would use for learning in the classroom - this makes it so easy to share resources with other teachers and to look something up easily to find the best options for the task at hand.

Resources that I started using last year, stopped and restarted:
Twitter
At first, I struggled with the Twitter platform because it did not seem like a place where I would learn things such as the world of learning that has opened up since I started looking at YouTube. I am giving it another chance though and am following people and organizations to help me keep in touch with the francophonie, teaching mentors, schools and local community organizations. In my last placement I found the twitter for the Notre Dame Cathedrale in Paris, because of a unit we were working on in class. Oh la la! - this past week, they posted a picture of the rainwater being wicked away from the foundations on a rainy day. Techonology from 800 years ago still working! Amazing virtual travelling!

Symbaloo
I liked the design of the platform right from the beginning, and I have also found it very easy to use. The videos are embedded and easy to find and categorize. I have curated a number of videos that I will re-watch or that can be used in the classroom.

Evernote
I had heard about it great uses before even starting the Education program but I had not made the effort to get comfortable with it as a method of curating. I am glad that I have persevered though, for one it will keep me from having to leave so many windows open on my laptop ... can anyone relate with that as a strategy?

Feedly
I have to admit, I had completely forgotten about it until blogging returned to my life. I enjoy staying connected with my classmates over the term. I am still trying to find worthy blogs that are outside of taking this course to add.

Google Docs
This has been very practical for sharing tasks with colleagues. In the classroom setting, I noticed that when students had a presentation to do, they were able to use google docs and google drive and save themselves from having to carry around a portable flashdrive.

Excel
After some deliberating I decided to use an old stand-by, Excel, which allows me to sort and alphabetize the colomns overall or by category. For example here are my Apps and sites for curation:

diigo	curation
evernote	curation
feedly	curation
pearltrees	curation
pocket	curation
scoop it	curation
Start.Me	curation
symbaloo	curation

Documenting Growth

Well, it's one year on, from the creation of my first blog. I still smile when I talk about how I thought that I would not like blogging but then once I started to blog, I found that I enjoyed it tremendously.

When I am enthusiastic about something, I like to share with others, and I was able to share so many resources and experiences from last year in my placements and when I returned to being an E.A. for the last time for May and June of last year. I found that the teachers that have been teaching for a few short years are already feeling like they are a distance away from the cutting edge of Internet resources and advancement. We are at an advantage in taking this course and curating our information that we have gathered in order to be able to share it with our future colleagues. I am pleased that I took time over the Christmas Break to add to the spreadsheet that I had started in last year's class as well as create a Symbaloo for videos that I like for professional development and for classroom use.

Looking outward now, I want to say that there is much to learn from the connections that are made on our behalf, as good mentors do. A great example of this is when Tyler Letkeman and Kristen Thompson were invited into our classroom space. These two teachers leave us with the impression that integrating tech and the internet in our classes is rewarding and worthwhile.

I loved how Kristen's message for us was broken down into three parts. Curation/organization, Communication/connection, and assessment. What I will take away best I will be that it is okay to add technology to our classrooms in stages. It can be easy to become overwhelmed by someone who has an enthusiasm for tech and implements everything and they have so much going on. Tech integration needs to work for the person using it. If for example, one thing such as weekly emails sent to parents is working and you are getting positive feedback from parents then you are ready to expand into something more. Keep things realistic for yourself with the expectation of succeeding, then just as importantly, keep setting new goals! By the same token, if you are trying a classroom website and updates on Twitter and struggling to keep up or the feedback isn't what you thought it would be then it is okay to drop it. Maybe the timing will work better another semester or another year.

It was my third time attending one of Tyler Letkeman's talks and look forward to others in the future. He has shared specific ways in which he integrates technology into his classes. I adapted one of his ideas already in my French class last term - #bestwordchallenge with my grade nine class. I felt it was a successful challenge for the students to explore French vocabulary for describing a scene. I have also taken close notes on how Tyler makes Shakespeare in the classroom relevant by integrating Quizlet and turning "I can't believe you studied" to "I can't believe you didn't work on this" when learning the modern synonyms to Shakespearean language. My grade 10 ELA class coming up will hopefully prove this strategy works.

And so, I am at the beginning of a new journey with #I4Ed ...
Is it risky to admit I am not much of a Star Wars fan? As I explored the resources from the course website, I came across an article by Nathan Jurgensen about Augmented Reality. I think Cyborgology will be an interesting source of material to share with students to open up great discussions. @cyborgology

By Cyborg (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons