Barriers, blind spots and blind sights- I know that I made a conscious decision to work within mainstream education. I looked into alternative educational training but felt that as it was not accessible to all I did not want to work just within that realm. I will never forget my university interview when I could not give an example of a favourite teacher with qualities and my whoops moment after a monolgue of what was wrong within my schooling in terms of racism, sexism,  and so forth. (Thankfully the two professors laughed as it was the first interview they had conducted in twenty years with someone having had such a negative experience that I was offered a place) I wanted to make a difference, to create a picture with those inner city children where they could see another world, another possibility. I know that in making that decision to work within a heirarchy I have bumped into barriers, blind spots and blind sights. When the discussion has come up about the way schooling is done I have suggested to students to become politicians who can change policy. I agree we as teachers can influence from within too.

Advice From a Tree

Dear Friend

Stand tall and proud
Sink your roots deeply into the earth
Reflect the light of your true nature
Think long term
Go out on a limb
Remember your place among all living beings
Embrace with joy the changing seasons
For each yields its own abundance
The energy and birth of spring
The growth and contentment of summer
The wisdom to let go the leaves in the fall
The rest and quiet renewal of winter

Feel the wind and the sun
And delight in their presence
Look up at the moon that shines down upon you
And the mystery of the stars at night
Seek nourishment from the good things in life
Simple pleasures
Earth, fresh air, light
Be content with your natural beauty
Drink plenty of water
Let your limbs sway and dance in the breezes
Be flexible
Remember your roots
Enjoy the view!

Written by Ilan Shamir

Advice from a Tree

As I look towards my inquiry project and possible barriers I ponder the scenario of a smile, nod and thank you afterwards. I know in my life when I made a mind shift to small is beautiful and that change by example is great way for others to see in real life. Walk your talk. I want to move forward with ICT in a meaningful way in my practice and am so excited to have my class web page ready for September for it to grow and evolve with the class. I want to offer real suggestions in this project that are reachable within my school and work with Pro D in the district too. One step at a time. Now is this learning group and this presentation.

Over night, in the morning, through the day and back tonight I continue to move across the points of inquiry on the BCTLAs star. Through discussion with Jenny I need to reflect again on the foundations of this course with reference to my presentation. To incorporate the process of our learning group to way in which the district should be considering ICT.

Our district has been working with Judy Halbert and Linda Kaser with the Spiral of Inquiry for Equity and Quality (2013) model over the past year. This will continue on into the next school year too. I feel that this is a resource that needs to be included.

I returned to my presentation- I will be sharing my project with the District Principal for Distributed Learning & Technology Integration and the Assistant Superintendent. There may be an opportunity to invite the Pro D chair who has also been a part of the Tech Committee.

Inquiry Concept Map

As I reflected on my learning over these three weeks and I wanted to return to the connected self in relation to Maturna and Varela’s work on Autopoesis linking it to Structural Coupling and the Linguistic Cognitive Domain. Halbert and Kaser make reference to Archibald’s work out of UBC who speaks of the “Indigenous Knowledge as being experiential, storied, relational, contextual and holistic” (p.11).

I want to communicate this process in relation to this learning group, share the data as it relates to stakeholders and give opportunity for an interactive question piece within the presentation. The data touches on all aspects of ICT uses in the district. I hope that this presentation will continue the connection and collaboration needed to create more meaningful use and policy conditions within the district.

Through re reading the email from my district containing the data collected by teachers I have been asked to take an objective look and compile them into one set of observations. As I have struggled with various charting formats which I am happy to share with the district I was not completely happy with the result.

In the middle of last night I realised that I wanted to find a simple way to info graph the themes that were presented in SWOT results as they affected each stakeholder group within the district. I knew that I wanted to add an interactive aspect to the presentation that allowed for instant participation. I spent a fair amount of time within Google Drive trying to see how to import a word info graph I had made, I considered Piktochart but realised it was not exactly what I wanted. Finally this evening I managed to make a simple info graph within Google Drive that I repeated as a template to consider student, teacher, admin and trustees. I continued to work on a very rough draft of my presentation that I want more feedback on as I look to move forward.

The structural coupling aspect is the most important aspect to be considered within this presentation with consideration given to each specific stakeholder who maybe part of the audience.

It felt good to feel that I was moving forward again having bounced back and forth across the Inquiry Star. I also included a last page of my thoughts…now I am back at the point of reflection as I stop writing this for the night.

As I began to look at the SWOT ( Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) data that was shared from my district I realised how difficult it would be to summarise the information into some kind of cohesive picture. As there was no data from one of the three middle schools this added another element to the enormity of the complete picture.

I chose to explore a spreadsheet database to highlight answers given from each page of information- two being summaries from the elementary level and secondary level, two separate middle schools, the on line school and alternative school. As the day progressed I thought it might be interesting to reorganise the data as a set questions with checkboxes for each of the six pages  for each area under SWOT. These results gave me the opportunity to see percentages and bar graph trends. The more I thought the more I realized that this could not take into account student population within each level or the amount of teachers. It was an interesting process, but I feel that it can only be used to see trends.

I wanted to reflect on the presentation piece and looked at ideas that I had floating around and how pull them together into some kind of format. I want to celebrate the successes that the district has made on a district level, consider pedagogy surrounding ICT in education. ministry direction, inquiry based learning, and suggest ways to move forward. Within this process there needs to be a format for discussion and collaboration. I began to formulate some ideas in a presentation mode within Google Drive that would allow the possibility of live input during a presentation.

Now for some sleep.

An intense, exhilarating and creative course. Everyday there are new resources to explore, in-depth discussion and collaboration with colleagues, referencing to concepts and pedagogy, informative and exciting presentations to listen to.  My ICT skills have definitely advanced as I am immersing myself in my new MacBook Air after years on a PC and am navigating all the forms of collaboration within our group through bogs, forums, and tweets. I have been inspired by many of the different presentations and I am trying to be mindful of which ones I want to explore for this coming year while creating a list of others to revisit later.

After Michelle’s presentation on blogging I saw an opportunity to take my class communication to parents to another level through a class website. I am eagerly creating a class website on Weebly that has allowed me to incorporate many links and ideas into a more interactive space with a blog page too. Under homework I have included a multi-linked toolbox as well as a quiz of a week link through Google Drive that will be updated each week and results discussed in class. This morning I have been working on a Good Books page with links to the local library, a local book store reviews and a Shelfari that I created with the hopes that students will add to the books and reviews there.  Alongside this I am working on my inquiry project exploring policy conditions in my District and am presently using a spreadsheet in Google Drive to add in all the SWOT information collected from teachers by the district in regards to ICT.

The future is full of possibilities as I have been asked to present my project at the School District. I am working towards publishing my class website ready for September. I have been invited to join the Pro D committee and hope to be able to explore positive ways to enable all teachers to use ICT in meaningful ways in their practice. I am joining a pre existing book club to continue the conversation with colleagues. Within my class I hope to explore a possibility of incorporating book trailers, Geocaching, Phylomon and Project Noah into the year. I want my ICT to be meaningful for the students within an inquiry based model.  As I will be continuing my studies on line I hope stay connected with people in this learning group as we move forward on our journey together.

During our searching and discussion I found a link to beautiful photographs of libraries that I found inspiring in a way.

Interesting Libraries

Digital World Libraries sounds quite exciting in the concept of making connections globally, access to more resources, round the clock availability, no physical boundaries and take up less space. There are challenges too that include how digital information is stored long term- where and for how long, copyright issues across different countries, accessibility for all  and the implications for a physical library. Teacher Librarians need to be prepared for their changing role to educate students about digital libraries and how to use them effectively.

I feel strongly that both digital and physical libraries must compliment each other in the future. I see that they can provide distinct roles. I feel the physical library does play an important role in the community as a place for many to connect with, provide access to the internet for those who do not have it, celebrate the pleasure of a physical book, share stories to children in a group setting, author visits and help research information for those who find it a difficult skill. As we live in a global community, I see digital libraries enhancing that global connection with a greater access to more resources at any time.

As a teacher I love to read and share physical books with my students. To share a beautiful illustration and pausing to turn a page at a climatic moment. I feel some of those special moments would be lost forever without a physical book. I also see the benefit of a digital copy and in the past year students have accessed novels through Kurzweil to allow them to hear the book read to them and also had a novel translated digitally for my International Student. On a personal note I have carried my personal library from England and taken it to different locations in BC. I have built shelves in two different homes designed especially for my books. Despite the physical effort involved in moving the books, when I place them on a shelf in a new location there is special memory of our sharing together that is triggered in the touch. Each tells more than one story in that memory.

Here are a couple of links:

Digital v. Physical Libraries

Where do we go from here? The next decade for digital libraries.

Jenny Arntzen and Autopoesis

I enjoyed hearing the discussion on autopoesis and other than a new word I feel that I made my choice to live with this understanding from an early age in this world. I also go to great lengths in my class to illuminate to the class the connectedness of all living beings and for every action there is a reaction. The need to be mindful in all that we do.  Within the structural coupling piece I feel that we as humans tend to surround ourselves with like minded beings and some choose not to move outside of that perceived “safe” zone. There is the constant movement of time that facilitates the process of movement and thereby experience and how that connects in cognitive, cultural and technological ways. I was excited to be reminded of the linguistic cognitive piece as I have said earlier the way forward for ICT is through connection, collaboration and creativity by all stakeholders. This might take time to ensure trust and safety are in place to ensure some level of success in education.

My inquiry piece is ever present in my thoughts and actions over the course of a day. I spent a certain amount of time exploring various venn diagram resources on the web, but as yet have not found the way I wish to present the district’s information. I also discovered some ICT Policy documents in draft format on the staff portal but I have more questions as to how they came to be there and when and what will take them to another level? What is the process? So I find myself darting back across the star of inquiry to spend time investigating more this evening.

Pixton Comics

My quick cartoon…

I attended a Pro D on Pixton Comics and was very impressed by the strong presentation and the 360 rotational capabilities for characters that this program offered in the elementary setting.

Pros

1.  Students create their own Avatar to identify with.
2. As open ended as the teacher wished for the class to create comics.
3. Ability to scaffold learning with an option to set assignments that are self designed or drawn from a bank.
4. A framework of characters and settings allowed for quicker completion for students to see results.
5. Choice of expressions and 3D movement created a huge level of student engagement.
6. Ability to use text or not made it more accessible to those with specific learning needs.
7. An option for using rubrics as a means to assess.
8. All cartoons get approved by the teacher before they get published, with the ability to return them to the student with comments or edits.
9. Within the student gallery the rest of the class can enjoy the work of the group with the ability to comment on each other’s work.
10. All comments have to get teacher approval before they get published.
11. Students can message you too if they have questions or concerns.
12. Students can log in outside of school if they have access.
13. Students loved this program!

Cons

1. The site costs money and requires a license.
2. There is a time commitment on the teacher to manage the site so that publishing gets done.
3. There is a limit to characters and backgrounds.

I have used Pixton for the past two years and trust that is an option for the next school year. One of my students knew how much I enjoyed Yoga and he gifted me his cartoon design:

The gift of yoga…