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…

After the discussion of inquiry focus possibilities on Friday, I felt drawn to consider the policy decisions within processes for ICT school district plans. Through the connection and collaboration with the learning group at UBC this past week I realized there were large differences in terms of resources, access, Pro-D and cultural dimensions associated to ICT that affect the connected self between school districts in BC. Despite the Ministry of Education’s best efforts to define technology and information literacy with reference to the 21st Century Learning school districts have chosen to approach policy conditions with these definitions in very different ways.

As my thought processes moved through connecting to wondering I found myself with more questions than answers. I knew that two thirds of my districts computers were on their way to becoming obsolete, but I wanted to know more about my district and in which direction is it choosing to move. I needed to begin to investigate further.

I spent part of the weekend connecting with the District Principal for Distributed Learning and Technology Integration and the Assistant Superintendent to get permission to access information on ICT collected from teachers with the primary purpose of creating a tech plan for the district.

Through class collaboration and discussion this morning our group constructed a mind map of beginning thoughts on Access and Equity. This was posted earlier to the blog.

At the same time I received the exciting news that I had permission to go ahead and take an objective look at the documents and compile them into one set of observations to take back to the district.