#edCampLdn Reflections

So...it's over.  

Ed Camp London has come and gone.  I'm feeling like Christmas Day at about 9 pm.  All the excitement is over, the presents are opened, the huge meal it took days to prepare has been devoured, the guests have all gone home and I'm feeling very full (but instead of a full tummy, it's my brain that is experiencing the turkey sweats) and a little sad that it's all over.   Time to chill, review the day, and perhaps squeak in a nap before supper (I told you, my brain is tired!).

If you have never been to an Ed Camp before (like me!), it is a workshop/conference with no set agenda.  As you arrive, you fill out sticky notes of things you would like to learn about, or would be willing to share about.  The organizers then start to build sessions around common themes.  Nobody actually presents.  You gather and discuss these topics.  You share ideas.  Have a question?  Someone in the room may be able to answer it - or may ask you another question.  It's some pretty rich discussion and an amazing environment to learn in.  This may have been my first EdCamp - but it sure won't be my last!

The Day began with some Ignite talks.  That's where the speakers get a set time and a slide show that advances every few seconds automatically, to share a message with the attendees.  Jay Dubois gave his very first Ignite about trying new things - encouraging us to write in pen so we can't change our mind and erase our good intentions.  Jen Giffen spoke about moving away from the game of school and encouraging our Students to create, not imitate.  Melanie Mulcaster talked about the vision behind great makerspaces.  Derek Tangredi and his former student, Valentina, talked about teachers making a difference by the headlines that don't happen, the importance of empathy, and that students don't need Teachers to be perfect, they just need us to care.  David Carruthers reminded us not to tone it down - not to let the naysayers dim our light.  I love watching Ignite talks.  They don't just fire you up for the rest of the day - they leave you with lots to think about going forward.

I was a part of a small but might session on Coding with Derek Tangredi, his former student Valentina, Doug Peterson, Luigi @TeachCodeCreate (sorry Luigi, I forget your last name!), Melanie Mulcaster and a few others and was blown away by some of the new things discussed.  I picked up some new coding sites too - I can't wait to try Codemoji.com with my students!  Doug brought up an important point as well - that coding is not always about training coders - that it is also about the logic, computational skills and type of thinking that Students are doing when they learn to code.  And Luigi - who works for the Boston Celtics by the way - where the heck would I ever meet someone who does what he does and be able to learn some of the amazing applications coding has in the real world, and the way he is able to condense that into some real world applications for students. 

Then I went to the makerspace at Sir Arthur Currie PS (and thanks to Principal Sue Bruyns for hosting this event in her amazing new building!) and played with some Ozobots and Blue Bots.  Luigi and Melanie were there again - and just listening to how they were working out a lesson using several ozobots and applying it to solving big city traffic issues was like watching master coding teachers at work.  And I will also admit - the bots are just fun to play with too.

After lunch I got to spend an hour discussing FlipGrid and Podcasting with a great group of educators, but for me a real highlight was getting to spend the hour just chatting with Jen Giffen about these subjects (I but a lowly apprentice to the great master) - who I am in awe of.  We also migrated into the power of Twitter for learning, ideas and your PLN. 

My last session was on Global Competencies.  I must apologize to my fellow attendies - my cold medication was wearing off and I was going a bit in and out of focus on this one.  But it was great to have a Student with us and sharing her insights on empathy and communication.

Another great thing about being a part of Ed Camp (as Dawn Telfer and I discussed) is that there are really only positive, innovative, on the band wagon, driving the train folks in attendance.  You would be hard pressed to find a safer environment to get your ed-tech or edu-geek on.  Those who would tell you to "dial it down" or "stop making the rest of us look bad" - are not getting up on a Saturday morning for an event like this.  And some folks, like Jen Giffen and Doug Peterson had pretty long drives to get here.  We were all there because we wanted to be.  We all wanted to learn and we all wanted to share.  Pretty amazing.

Really, though, I think the real power of EdCamp is the connections you make and the conversations you have.  I got to meet Derek Tangredi, Cliff Kraeker, Jay Dubois, Peter McAsh, Andrew Forgrave, Sue Bruyns, Jen Artan, and Diana Hughes, IRL (aka in real life) for the first time.  It is always cool to meet the folks you count as part of your PLN, or chat with online.  I even recruited a few of these folks for future "I Wish I Knew EDU" podcasts.  (You know who you are and thanks for taking the leap and saying yes to podcasting with me!  If you are reading this and would like to make that leap - DM me - I'd love to chat with you!).  It's also a great place to chat with folks you don't get to see much, but whose input you value greatly.  I caught up with Doug Peterson, Melanie Mulcaster, Jen Giffen, Dawn Telfer, David Carruthers, and Heidi Solway, to name a few.  I also met a lot fascinating people who I have added to my PLN.

Thanks to the EdCamp London organizers (my apologies if I have missed anyone): Sue Bruyns, David Carruthers, Heidi Solway, Jay Dubois, Dawn Telfer, Diana Hughes.  You put a lot of hours into a fantastic event and I thank you.  If you were there or have been to EdCamp before, please feel free to share some of your reflections in my comments section below.  I'm always interested in what you have to share.  But right now, I'm going to try and sneak that 15 minute cat nap in.  My brain is Full!

Investing in their Passions

This year I dove into Passion Projects with my class.  

Some folks call it Genius Hour.  I prefer Passion Projects.  I get a bit worried that the word genius puts  a lot of pressure on my students to create something that is the "be-all-and-end-all-perfect-project".  That's not what I was asking them for.  I wanted them to pursue something they are passionate about and find a way to show me what they'd learned.  I would be there for advice and help if needed, but mostly this was to be all on them (with a little scaffolding in some places and lots of scaffolding in others).

I'd heard about these Passion Projects through course work, colleagues and Twitter.  I did a bit of reading over the summer on them.  Come September, it was time to make the leap.  And leap we did.  I introduced the idea to them through a fun little PowToon creation.  I told them I was giving them 75 minutes (1 Period) a week on Fridays to work on it.  We did some activities to help them discover their interests and to help them decide what to focus on.  There were interest surveys.  We played some games where they had to complete sentence stems like:  'When I can do whatever I want, I like to..."  They created Popplets.  They discussed ideas with their elbow partners, the two Educational Assistants, and myself.

Then they had to commit to their project and Pitch it to the class.  Things got a bit bogged down here.  They wanted to get into the projects and didn't understand the idea of the pitch, despite lots of examples and interventions.  After a frustrating third Friday of working on these, we had a class discussion, where we collectively voted to toss out the pitch component.  We still needed some way of getting them to commit to and focus on their topic/guiding questions.  Our solution: they would blog or vlog about what their project would be in a minimum of 5 sentences.  Now we were cooking with gas!

Some of them got really involved in their projects.  They were working on them at home, at night and on weekends.  A student working on a Pixton.com Comic Book format on Monster Trucks for her project added all kinds of pictures she took when she went to these events - and lots from the Internet too. One of the girls was doing her project on the St. Thomas Stars hockey team.  She was meeting with the team coaches and players, conducting interviews and even talked her mom into getting her a Chromebook at home, so she wasn't hogging the family desktop to work on her project all the time.  One changed his mind midstream and completely revamped his project.  Two of them needed a lot of support and assistance to create their e-books using the Book Creator App.  One student with a lot of issues at home, and very low attendance, has not been able to produce a lot.  When he's at school, he does what he can.  He might not finish what he started.  And that's okay.

This week, about half of my class finished their Passion Projects.  In the next few weeks, hopefully they all finish, or get to a point where they can present their projects to each other.  It's hard to get parents in for these events, so I will record these and put them in each student's portfolio. You can see their portfolios and finished projects on our Passion Project Website (they were all excited when I asked them if I could share this in my blog.  They are very proud of these projects and the work that went into them).  The completed projects (as of April 20th, 2018) are those of: Deanna, Kalley, Dylan and Connor.

Image from: https://www.success.com/sites/default/files/7_4.jpg

There are no grades in my classroom.  Never really have been.  Everything is guided by the IEP and our report cards have no marks, only feedback and next steps for their individual goals.  (I might be ahead of the curve on the "no grading" trend.)  In their video reflection on the day they finish the project, I've asked them to assess their work skills and their final product by giving themselves a grade of A, B or C.  They will give each other some Peer feedback through FlipGrid.com and I have been giving feedback all through the process, so all that's left after that is to celebrate their success with a party on a Friday in late May.


Will our class be doing Passion Projects again in the fall?   Absolutely!  I will do more reflection on this over the summer and I know I will tweak things a bit, but overall, I think it went really well.  They were highly motivated, engaged and directing their own learning.  A few things I would change?  I need to have more structure for a few of them.  The wide open nature of the product was too much for them and seemed to paralyze them a bit.  When I gave those particular students a framework to go from, they were able to work more independently again.  The pitch portion needs to be scaled down - like I mentioned earlier, a blog or vlog will do in our room.  I thought they would be able to complete these projects within the semester and start a new one for semester 2.  Nope.  It takes time to do these well.  I'm glad I didn't push them to finish quicker, or to cut off their inquiry too soon.  It took almost the entire school year of Friday period 1s to get to where we got.  And that's okay with me, too.

To paraphrase Kid President, and Robert Frost (my apologies to Mr. Frost);
We came to where the road split into two paths and we took the one less travelled.
We wanted to be on the path that leads to awesome.
And we found a whole lotta awesome!

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Blogger's Block and the Winter Olympics

Blogger's Note:
I know this post is a little late. Yes, the Olympics were over more than a month ago. I've got a few excuses; like things got busy, I was away for March Break, I was starting my Podcast. Blah ditty, Blah ditty, blah, blah, blah.  If I'm being honest...and what's the point of blogging if you aren't going to be honest with yourself...I had a serious case of Blogger's Block.

Yep, the dreaded ole' 2B.

I tried starting this post, and about four others on various topics, on several occasions.  All crap.  Just a bunch of fragmented words and loosey goosey ideas floating around like a bucket of minnows.

But, I'm back.

I think.

Maybe let me know what you think in the comments, after you've read this.  I thank you in advance for your patience.  Without further ado...here's the real post.

Winter Olympics Fever

This February and into March, our classroom heated up with Olympics Fever.  We cheered our favorites, watched some of the death defying events, shared the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat (most during hockey games).  We also did a lot more than that, as the Olympics became a cross-curricular event of the educational kind.

We were lucky to have one of our Viking Teachers actually at the Olympics.  Math teacher, Mr. Higgs, is the coach of the USA Co-ed Curling Team.  He was sending us photos and updates from the games.  Which, really...was totally cool.  And so great of him to take the time to do.

Before the Opening Ceremonies, we discussed as a class how the Olympics could be a part of our learning over the next few weeks.  The students created a collaborative slide show of our Canadian Medal Winners.  They worked on projects about Canadian athletes.  Each day they updated our Google My Maps of the hometowns of Canadian Medal winners.  They researched the various sports that are a part of the Winter Olympics and what is involved in training for them.  You can see some of their finished work on our classroom website.

We had some great morning discussions.  Each day we updated the Medal Standings and talked not just about how Canada was doing, but looked at them through a math lens.  One day near the end of the Olympics a Student brought up the idea of looking at how the results would have been different if the medals of the athletes from Russia had been included.  That was a great little math exercise.  But it got really interesting when it lead into the topic of cheating - not just at the Olympics, but in general.  They talked about how cheating is cheating if it's in Sports or anything else in life.  Some of them thought cheating at a card game was okay, but only if there was no money involved.  One of them pointed out that Olympic Athletes are not paid for being at the Olympics, so did that make cheating there ok?  It was a really great discussion with lots of give and take.

There were some great mini science and physical education/health lessons looking at the different events.  The basic physics that was involved in a ski jump or a triple axel became fascinating.  We didn't always understand the properties behind them, but we did gain a bigger appreciation for what it took to do these things and compete at an International level.  We also talked about why certain athletes might be better suited to certain sports.  The day after Tessa and Scott competed, we talked about the difference in ice dancing and pairs skating - and why in Pairs Skating, the male partner is usually very tall and his partner very tiny, so that they are able to pick the lady up and propel her across the ice in a throw or lift.  But they noticed that in Ice Dancing, the pair was close in height because it looks nice and they don't do the throws that the Pairs do.

They were able to see how all the things we've been learning about Growth Mindset would be really important for athletes and the idea of working towards a personal best being as important for athletes as winning a medal.  I asked them if they thought that this same concept would apply to them in Special Olympics or in their lives in general.  Most of them said they thought it did.  I'll admit to getting a little more heavily involved in pushing this conversation, and I really hope they are able to transfer this to their own ideas about growth mindset and continuous learning and improvement.

It really was just over a month of great learning and inquiry.  They were motivated.  They were excited about coming in each day and sharing what they had watched the night before.  Some of them were working on their projects...AT HOME!  Not because it was homework.  It wasn't.  Because they were just that into it.

There was so much more that we could have done, and maybe we might do the next time the Olympics roll around.  I would have loved to include the ParaOlympics in the Unit - but they were held during March Break, so the timing was off.  The Canadian Olympic School Program site had great activities that tied more directly with Physical Education - we didn't have any gym time this semester,  but I think they would be great to do if we did.  I might have been able to bring in some art and music by tying into the Opening and Closing ceremonies, and looking at the team logos and uniforms.  There is just so much we could do - but at some point, you need to move on to other things, or we would still be doing the Olympics in June.

We were sad to see the Winter Olympics end.  But - 2022 will be here before we know it.  Time is like that.  I'd be interested to hear if others used the Olympics as a thematic approach to curriculum?  What types of things did you do in your classrooms?