As a professional, reflection takes up a large part of our lives. Active choices stem from reflective moments steering our professional learning. Ultimately that learning reflects back into our classrooms with students. We were privileged to spend Friday with a group of K-12 teachers and student teachers at Burnaby Central. Titled “Blogathon“, it provided an…
Tag: multimodal
Voice and Choice – Teachers & Students Ring Out
From time to time we continue our focus on sharing practices in SD41 that create community and build connected stories using our blogs. On the Cariboo side of the city, resides Armstrong teacher, Jude Comeau. Her blog called Division 11’s Class Blog-Learning One Byte At A Time, is a hive of connected learning. Her purposes are…
Who’s Telling Your Story If You’re Not?
Storytelling is as important today as years past – perhaps more so. There are many competing forces and it is challenging to capture audience’s attention. Questions to consider might be “What is your story? Who is telling your story? How are you telling it? Is it getting to the audience you wish?” Answers will differ…
In-Between the Cracks – Questions Spark Genius
Have you ever looked at a dandelion? I mean really looked at it from all facets? OK so you have to crouch down, let your imagination flow, and ignore the stares that will obviously come. In a little while, you’ll get a stream of questions from a group peering over you, “What are ya lookin’…
iPad Apps that Enhance your Language Arts Program
Joined by a group of enthusiastic K-12 teachers and principals, we explored a number of apps at our District Pro-D session on February 21st. The feature story was Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin. After listening to the story and the oh-so catchy song, we used a strategy called Milling…
Digital Learning Day – Feb 5
The days of January have been whizzing by, partly due to the start of another term and partly due to our wonderful west coast weather. Having some sun certainly invites a bit more energy in the steps as well as some hopeful signs of spring just around the corner. We are hearing about so many…
App #10 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #10: Partner a beautiful image that you’ve drawn or photographed with interactivity and you’ve got Thinglink. These rich interactives provide another way to curate and organize information. I’ve written about this before using the SAMR Model as an example (developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, Ph.D) and also here where I was participating in CLMOOC. Thinglink offers interaction tools that tag photos or images…
App #9 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #9: In our effort to highlight the SAMR Model of integration of technology, we’ve been considering what activities might fit into Redefinition (technology that allows creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable). What activities might have significant impact to student outcomes? The “tell your story” concept remains one of the powerful ways we have to teach others, to increase audience,…
App #7 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #7: How do you present information from research projects? Usually we default to PowerPoint. Another option is Haiku Deck for all platforms. I wrote about this app for the iPad before (click here). The presentation software offers a beautiful, yet simplistic way to to share information. Each slide offers options for layout, format (bullet points), images (including…
App #5 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #5: Many of us have our students write stories and then illustrate the text. While the artists in the bunch do flips and cartwheels (and I’ve had those students), what happens to those who struggle with drawing the simplest shapes. You know what I mean… somehow my tree just doesn’t quite look like a…
App #3 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #3: What happens when you bring together an ipad, an app, words, thoughts, and sound? Why Book Creator of course. This app for the ipad is a thing of beauty when it comes to creating ebooks. Images can be drawn or photographed and inserted along with text. As well, audio can enhance both the background environment…
App #2 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #2: We all collect lists of websites to use in our classes or professional learning. Many of you use online tools such as Diigo (my favourite) or Delicious to organize these for easy retrieval. Another one along this line is Symbaloo or to be precise, Edu.Symbaloo. (I’ve written about this before.) This site takes bookmarks and creates imaged tiles for…
10 Apps to Countdown the Season
In keeping with the season and heading towards the winter break, I’m doing a countdown of 10 apps that add spice to your toolkit. Regardless of the application or tool you choose to use, it always comes back to purpose. APP #1: Picslice is an online application (no downloading) that will take…
How Do You Communicate?
More than any other initiative we’ve been a part, none have reached the level of activity as our wordpress blogging platform. This pilot grew from humble beginnings with the simple goal of “tell your story”. Our question – what would happen if we gave our people an opportunity to open a window into classrooms or…
Using Technologies With A Purpose
The SAMR Model [developed by Ruben Puentedura] offers a framework for viewing how we integrate technologies into our curricula. Broken into four sections [Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition], it is a simple way to group activities that provide a variety of purposes. The goal is to move towards teaching ‘above the line’. You can hover over different parts of…
September Newsletter Off The Presses
September is filled with a mix of “welcome back activities” as well as planning for possibilities. Our September Newsletter is hot off the presses. Click here for your copy. You can also click on the News tab in the navigation bar for an archive of all the newsletters.
A Year of Discovery
It’s June and I’m really not sure what happened to this year. The ten months prior have whizzed by and here we are again. I wanted to take this moment to share some reflections of the year and try to put things into perspective. Our Writers Workshop folks grappled with ideas related not only…
Interactive Images – Using Thinglink
There are moments when an image tells a better story than just having a bunch of words on a page (actually that’s most of the time). However when that image has a level of interactivity such that it delivers even more information, then you have a perfect marriage of visual and linguistic. On any given…
It’s All in the Workflow
Maybe this post should have been called “Sanity is Everything”. You’ve decided on an inquiry project that injects elements of learning technologies. Besides knowing what software you’re going to use and booking the lab or equipment, you dive in. Not so fast! These next thinking steps will allow you to experience a successful project [aka…
Lightbulb Moment – Conversation in the Round
Recently an email landed in my box with a link to a voicethread. For those of you who haven’t seen VoiceThread, it’s a handy tool for collaborative communication out on the web. But let’s start at the beginning. I was involved in a planning project with a school envisioning a whole flip of their library. Aaahh, “Martha…