Setting Goals- mine

My new school has a Social Emotional Learning goal, focusing on SELF AWARENESS. A big part of the ProD that we have been working on is our own s my self-awareness, as teachers and as human beings. I am sitting in a meeting in my team discussing this with a District resources person. We are talking about our needs and what we are going to do now around teaching social and emotional competencies in our classrooms. As part of this process we were to think about our own personal goals for our school year, and to find another person at our school to share our progress with over the year. To that end I have tentatively formulated two goals: 1. I will get to know my students better than ever before and use this knowledge of individuals to inform my teaching in new ways. 2. I will encourage my students to use their self-knowledge to make choices in more of their academic work (such as using their learning style to help them choose the type of product they will create in an inquiry-based learning project). One of my goals is to introduce Passion projects/ genius hour. We are going to use blog entries as a research journal to monitor our progress on this project. I hope that giving students voice and choice on their topic as well as the format of their final sharing will enable them to play to their strength, be engaged in the project and enjoy themselves. In order to prepare for this project I have begun blogging with my students and working on comments/posting/tagging/categorizing their posts. We are also going to begin with a class research project in science to preview some of the skills needed for their independent assignments. This is my current work in progress...

Web 2.0 tools mentioned in my LIBE477 course

Created with Padlet

Grade 6 Math PLOs

Summer Reading

Summer reading has gotten off to a great start!!! The titles piled here are the ones I've finished so far. Love the Neil Flambe series. Close to the Heel is my favourite of these Seven Series titles. They are all books from my classroom library that I hadn't yet read. I brought them home so that I could finally finish them off. Next onto my collection of as yet unread e-books (of which there are many). I am going to finish The Fault in Our Stars first.

Characteristics we want to encourage in our students

 this wordle is based on a list generated by our staff at an SEL ProD in May.

Blogging from the UBC Chapman Learning Commons

Sitting in the Learning Commons is interesting. in the heart of the old building using some really up to date tech to do something new to me. People are being quiet but the lofty ceiling height makes for an echoey space. A learning commons is a new trend for K-12 school libraries that many TLs are interested in. I still don't think I have a handle on the concept. How is is different that simply having seating areas and work areas in your library?  I just love the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity in this space!

In addition to the workspaces for PCs and Macs they lend camcorders, laptops and LCD projectors. They also had Learning Centre assistants a cool website of student toolkits including pages on 'digital tattoos' and 'choosing technology'. All sorts of things that I wish I had had as a student in university back in the 90s when all I had was Kermit, AOL and dial-up. Pretty cool. But what is a learning commons in a K-12 school? Is it more then a library with a website?

This movement seems to be much farther along in the United States than in Canada, so is the Learning Commons being played out in the Canadian context? Here are some Canadian sources:

K-12Learning Commons  

BCLibraries video 

School District 73 

The Alberta school Library Council: 

The Ontario Library Association: 

Do you have a Learning Commons at your school? What is it like and how was it developed?

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

<a href="http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/9764089/?claim=werrxwkfegc">Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>

I found a new app that I'm trying out to replace Google Reader which as most people will now know has been discontinued by Google and we have until the middle of this month to take your data elsewhere. I'm trying bloglovin' which also has an iPad app.

Using Pearltrees.com

Here is a Pearltree.com creation representing my current coursework explorations around ICT issues. Seriously cool webbing that is embeddable and manipulatable in your blog.



or try it here:http://pear.ly/ccdTD

Using dropbox for collaboration

The humanities folder in Dropbox

I'm going to tell you a story.

Last June I was finished packing my room up on the last day of school, and I still had to hang around until 2:50. another member of team layoff and I were playing the imagine we got hired back to this school in this grade what would we get up to.

Timeline with Biography Projects

We proposed an idea for a graphic organizer to tie the two grade 8 teams together: a timeline out in the hallway that would start at one end of the grade 8 area and continue through the hallway to the end of the other grade 8 area covering the time period of the social studies curriculum. The two grade eight teams leaders decided to use Dropbox, as an alternative to the District's Staff Shared drive, to facilitate collaboration and sharing in our humanities course amongst all the grade eight teachers. It started out with our students biography project which we had planned to go with the time line graphic organizer.

The door of my classroom

 the biography project shared folder.

We created a humanities folder (the top pic) which which shared with all the grade 8 core teachers, as well as our librarian student services teachers. We created a folder for the biography project and various teachers contributed documents for the project including a rubric including PowerPoint presentations including the assignment sheet. Once the biography project was finished our collaborations continued with our "Outsiders" novel study, our Renaissance Fair. Teachers also uploaded resources to share for other units.

The moral of the story? Collaboration is not only possible face to face.  Being connected can enable us to continue deepen enhance our collaborations. And Dropbox helps my teams do this.

My Online Presence

I just started my seventh course in the teacher librarianship diploma program at UBC. I'm taking a special topics course this summer semester: LIBE 477B 951 (3.0): Media and Technologies in the School Library Program.

Yesterday we were asked to think about our "Online Social Presence". I have been accustomed to thinking the I don't have an online social presence because I never look at my Facebook and I'm not regularly involved another social media. However if we argue that having an online social presence is necessary in the modern educational setting I should attend to it, so I am starting this new blog independent of my coursework where I will blog about my thoughts on education, on school libraries, on books, and on my own practice.

Step one: setting up this blog!

In creating my list of 'other sites' I found content I have already created and made public. I've linked my Twitter account to this blog and listed this blog on my Twitter profile. I have googled myself. I found my Showme and some Prezis to which I have also linked. I also just got an email saying that someone had reprinted one of my pins on Pinterest.  There was more of me online than I had thought.

Now I need to look at what is next.

a review

Today I am reading a fun little book that combined a few of my favourite things: Japan, a mystery, a chef competition, and deep fried hotdogs. Well maybe not that last one. Neil Flambé and the Tokyo Treasure is the fourth book in the Neil Flambé Capers series by the Canadian broadcaster Kevin Sylvester.

The hero is a fifteen year old culinary genius who has his own restaurant in Vancouver. I am enjoying this series, which seems like a good boy book that would also appeal to girls. The pen and ink illustrations are good fun. I recommend!