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.