Re-Siever

Sometimes you just gotta believe.

The givens:

I have decided my action research question will focus on the circumstances and beliefs that lead to student engagement in learning. I really want to use blogging or digital storytelling as the lens through which to explore engagement. I also want to build my own skills in integrating technology so I can help my colleagues do the same.

The challenge:

At this point we are struggling for lab time. We have 500 + students with one 30 person lab. My students may not get enough time for these tech-intensive tasks. We may get a new lab sometime in the spring.

The fall-back position:

I could go to plan B (which was my plan A): investigate the effectiveness of action (drama) strategies such as hot-seating, role plays, and mantle of the expert in promoting student engagement in the content areas. I have been knocked out by Jeffrey Wilhelm’s excellent book Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension. I know his techniques grab and engage kids.

But…

I really get excited by using technology to create, communicate, and collaborate. I just don’t want irregular or limited access to the lab to frustrate my students or me to the point of giving up on technology.

So…

I started blogging with my students anyway. I was able to do a lot of the teaching part in class (yeah, laptop + data projector!), so the students could really use lab time for writing.

And then!

I got a call on Friday: we are going to have a 30-laptop cart in three weeks! I am not sure what kind yet (Dells? Asus EEE?) but they are wireless and have long battery life. I know there will be a steep learing curve, but I am game. It will double our access opportunities, which means I have a green light for the action research.

The moral of the story: Just do it.

Image by carbonated under a Creative Commons license.

Tags: "action research", blogging, digital storytelling, Jeffrey Wilhelm, laptops

I was just looking.

Used to be, I would browse the bulletin boards of my school at the end of the day to get a sense of what other teachers and students were doing. This teaching gig is pretty lonely, so I’d prowl for inspiration. I’d see the products of teaching and learning, beautifully displayed, and I would try to infer the process behind them. I suppose other teachers (and administrators, and parents, and kids) have done this, too. There is a lot of imagination required to figure out the teaching behind the results–and I know I wasn’t always right about what really went on.

Now I’m looking elsewhere.

Personal learning networks have changed all that. Teachers are opening their classrooms to each other and the world. I have learned so very much from others. Case in point: via Twitter, I began reading Diane Cordell’s blog. She shared a fabulous beginning-of-the-year activity to get her students thinking about class rules using images from Flickr as visual prompts. She wrote about the process, shared the links and the finalized SlideShare. The activity got her kids thinking both divergently and convergently about how a classroom can work as a community. I needed to do that, too.

So, I stole her idea.

It’s a good thing.

I used some of the same images, close to the same process, and like Diane, I’ll be sharing it with parents. The ideas the students came up with weren’t always what I expected, as was the case in Diane’s class.

OK, it’s not technically stealing if it is offered to you. I could say I was inspired by her, or motivated by her creativity, or piggybacked on her strategy, but stealing does sound a bit more…subversive. And in a way this sharing across the distances is still revolutionary. She’s in up-state New York, and I am on the west coast of Canada. I won’t ever get to see her bulletin boards. But I won’t need to. With blogs, wikis, SlideShare, Twitter, the Classroom 2.0 Ning, and a host of other networking tools, I have other ways to find inspiration from colleagues I’ve never met in person.

Here’e what my students and I came up with:

Now go ahead, steal this, please. I’ll steal from you if you steal from me.

Image: Peek a Boo by John A Ryan Creative Commons

Tags: agreements, Diane Cordell, Flickr, SlideShare, thinking, visual learning