joeteft

May 18, 2015

Presentation

So, here’s my enviroed story. It’s a story more than a presentation, walking through why I am an environmental educator, and some of the worries I have, it moves to the hope that we collaborate together in a 21st century learning community.

My primary worry is that we are becoming too individual, and as individuals it is harder to make large scale changes. I love the idea of personalized learning, but worry about how that effects our ability to work as a community and make decisions as a community. My desire is to move towards community based learning and problem solving while focusing on individual talents and ideas.

For me though, the formation of this community is key, and a big part of my community is the #enviroed team. So thanks for that. +Nicki Hambleton has also been a huge part of my community development, and a big reason for my belief in the community based education with individual talents.

May 9, 2015

Final Project for Coetail

by Gerry Dincher

Wow, this project took a lot of turns, but I feel it’s much better now than when I envisioned it many months ago.

This was my original UbD.

We started off on high notes, all the grade 3 classes started by taking pictures and then blogging about their favourite spots at school, almost all of the students finished and almost all of the students shared with at least one person. So It was somewhat successful as a start.

Most students took a picture of their spot, and thought about it. Most were of staircases, some were of the lunch area, a couple were of the soccer field. They then described it with the potential audience of someone who is coming to the school. They used their blogs to write an entry.

Almost all of the students ended with the task, two students (who I was working with a little earlier) picked an outdoor spot and created a stop motion video (which will be in my video). They then recorded some of the feelings over the images.

One of the students had a spot with a tree, and that tree died. Just this week we planted a tree in that same spot. His talking about his spot to his community really made a change in how people viewed their space.

Next time, I would want to have more time with the students. I only had them once a week, which isn’t a whole lot of time to dig deep into places and feelings. We needed to spend more time on creating a more meaningful platform I think, and developing connections with other places.

I want this to be a more meaningful exercise on developing sense of place, so next time I would work with that as well. I want students to develop emotional connections to people and places. By developing our stories, we can work on this connection. Next time I would try to use more video (stop motion) and blend in more images than just the one.

All in all I enjoyed the whole Coetail experience. It’s been great building the standards into our shared units, and building more meaningful digital citizenship lessons into my co-teaching experiences. I’m going to continue to develop connections, I firmly believe in connectivism and will help my students find people they want to learn from as well.

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April 23, 2015May 26, 2017

Developing relationships

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Just something to think about today, I think this will be the start of my presentation in a couple of weeks. I’m discussing how to use technology in, and for the environment in elementary school. I think it’s all about relationships, what do you think?

April 16, 2015May 26, 2017

Comm-unity

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For +COETAIL most of my community involvement has been focused on #enviroed. Since I’m merging the tech and environment. We talk every Thursday, which is pretty amazing, well Thursday for me Wednesday night for everyone else. Here is one of my favourite chats , mainly because it focuses specifically on tech and 21st century skills in environmental education.

As a group we explore what each other are doing, ask each other questions to get specifics, I’ve worked with two other teachers on their specific research project, and have asked a couple of teachers to work with me on my coetail project.

I’ve been trying to merge these two for awhile

+Nicki Hambleton has helped me out a ton too. We talk often in person. We bounce ideas off each other with pizza and wine (even if we shouldn’t always be eating it). It’s great for us (well me definitely) to be able to see reactions and just check in on and get checked in on. This personally has been one of the most valuable tools for me, not that Nicki is a tool. But she has directed me towards other people like Kerri-Lee and Dave, and has directed me towards Cognitive Coaching where I met up with other coetailers as well.

Mostly I feel like I’ve moved beyond just messing around, I’ve built part of my community (especially with #enviroed). Connectivism is a real thing in my life. I’m building on my connections, sand still reaching out for others.

It’s been a great journey so far, and I’m looking forward to even more in the last month.

April 9, 2015

Hybrid Minds

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This week, well the last couple of weeks, have been looking at Richard Louv’s idea of Hybrid Minds. Technology is something we have always been working on, and I imagine always will, the natural world, the world we are connected to (without wireless) is always here, and hopefully always will be. How can we pay attention to both? How can we develop both sustainably? Where do we go from here?

Lots of questions as I started reading these past couple of weeks, and while nothing has been explicitly answered, I feel my original thoughts are being reaffirmed.

My project with getting the students outside and documenting their spots has taken a smallish turn. Although they haven’t been publishing their thoughts or feelings so much, they have displayed a different attitude towards being outdoors.

Earlier in the year it was difficult to get them to put the ipads down, they wanted to keep holding on to them, checking out youtube videos, now they want to relax outside. They’ve been putting the ipads down, and just laying down, looking at their spots and just being in nature.

We have to find some way to mix the two of these realities though, and as I continue reading and working with our students, this is the goal.

March 13, 2015

Always Learning

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Reading George Couros‘ blog today about being Learning Savvy. In it he was talking about being tech savvy, and how he isn’t always comfortable with the term.

As an EdTech coach, people definitely see me as someone who has technology skills (even though I don’t necessarily see myself that way). Like George, I want to be more learning savvy.

Part of my action towards this is working on the Cognitive coaching workshops. I want to be more focused on how we approach learning, with a tech and environmental ed perspective, but the goal is the same, what is best for students’ learning.

Through my project on community, we have just finished our stories, and some of our blog entries. We’ve talked about our favourite places and people in hopes that we can connect with incoming students, to make their transitions a little easier. It’s not really about the tools we used, it’s about what we learned about ourselves, our favourite spots, and how we can improve our community.

March 5, 2015

Thinking about it

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For +COETAIL I am well into the process of collecting evidence and working with students to share spaces. I’m not sure how successful it will be but the process is enlightening for sure.

With students these past two weeks (the ones who aren’t working on my Coetail project) we are exploring digital citizenship, with the idea that it can shape the future of who we are.

Spencer Harrison and I used to work together, at the time I wasn’t as aware of the idea of personal brand. I was very conscious of displaying the image I wanted to show with the intention of challenge other people’s viewpoints. Spencer was one of the first people to tell me, my image or brand could be shaped without shaping me.

What this means for digital citizenship is that we aren’t always who we appear to be online. We all need to understand that a google search or looking at someone’s facebook, linkedin profile or whatever is not who that person really is. We can create our identity.

Since we are creating our identity, we should make sure it’s the best version of ourselves, and then try to live up to it. Our digital citizenship classes go into who do we want to be (as in what kind of person) and then how do we take action to be recognised as that type of person, what do they do.

The last two weeks have been pretty interesting to see what versions of themselves each students wants to present. They are thinking about their future, about who they want to be online, and how they can achieve this reality.

February 20, 2015

Working on Community

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I was reading this George Couros blog about smiling the other day about the importance of smiling and being aware of everyone in the learning community. I often think about who I am including when I go about my day, and who I may be excluding. I know that at times I focus solely on the students, and miss out on support staff and families. So this past week my goal was to engage them all with a smile.

Smiling made a bigger difference than I thought. Not only were people more interested in what I was doing, or what I had to say, but I actually felt better about my day too.