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

This video is why we should read blogs beyond teaching and technology: just for the joy of finding something like this.

I learned about Baman and Piderman through Drawn! The Illustration and Cartoon Blog. It is a multi-authored blog, and is rich with content of the eye-candy sort. The material is not always young student appropriate, but Drawn! often includes videos, cartoons, and illustrations that are perfect for classroom use. The blog won a best Canadian blog award in 2007.

The maker of this magical animation is Alex Butera, is a 22-year-old talent about to graduate from the Massachusetts College of Art. The charm of this video is the characterization of these two superheroes. The table slouching, the looking under the bed, and the sticky feet are so six-year-old boy, and their friendship is just plain sweet. The best part is the last few seconds with sandwich. Pure genius. I wonder how he made the sound of the meat flopping out and the bread hitting the bed.

I imagine Alex put hours upon hours into this 22 second gem. I am sure he is getting raves. I would love to know how his talent was encouraged in school and out.

Betcha can’t watch this only once.