I just read a blog post by @shareski What Are You Doing With All Your Photos? and it got me thinking. I am teaching a 7th/8th grade Beginning Photography class this year for the first time. According to some, it will be really easy. Have the students take a bunch of pictures with their phones, upload them to Instragram, add some formatting, and Voilà, done with planning for the year!
That sounded pretty good, but I decided to come up with a few other activities to do just in case I needed some backup. One of the lessons I am doing with my students is similar to what Dean mentioned in his blog. My students are going to take a picture a day, with one wrinkle, it needs to be a self-portrait. It can be anywhere, at anytime, with anyone or anything. The only requirement is that they take the picture.
Each week, students will choose one of the pictures they took and write about it. Students can write about whatever they would like. Some of the prompts could be:
- What they were doing?
- What they were thinking?
- How they were feeling?
- A story about the person, place, or thing in their picture.
- Or anything else they want to write about.
At the end of the year, they will choose one picture from each week, and create a collage, slideshow, video, etc. using the pictures. This creation will serve as a photographic timeline of their year!
During the past month, I have attended #ISTE12 and started professional development training through a Verizon grant. Needless to say my head is swimming with new ideas for my classroom this year. Here are a few of the things that I have heard about that I am interested in learning more about:
- Flipped classroom
- Inquiry
- Evernote
- PollEverywhere
- Voicethread
- Twitter
- Diigo
- Camtasia
- Blogging
- Scratch
- And more
Now there is no way any sane (not that I am completely) educator (trying to be completely) would try to incorporate half of these into their classroom at the same time. One might argue that you would be doing well if you tried a couple. I love to learn. I especially love to learn about new technology, pedagogy, lessons, etc. that will help to make me a better, more complete teacher. But if I want to truly learn and understand any of the above items well enough to use them with my students, I need to choose one or two and, watch tutorials, practice with them, read how others have used them, discuss with colleagues that may know about them, and put in a good amount of time doing so. These are things I WANT to learn more about, that I’m EXCITED to learn about, and I am still feeling a bit overwhelmed.
Now think about our students? Do they have a say in what they learn, how they learn it, and how much time they have to spend learning it?
I know the answers to these questions as they have pertained to my classroom, and I don’t like them!
I just finished watching a movie with my family that I have seen a hundred times. It’s called Dolphin Tale and if you haven’t seen it, see it. And if you have seen it, watch it again. The story is about a dolphin that loses its tail and a boy who befriends him. But watching it tonight, the story took on a whole new, and even better, meaning for me. This is a story of inquiry learning.
You see, I had the privilege of going to #ISTE12 this summer. There were many major themes that wove themselves throughout the conference. I sat in sessions that helped me understand how to flip my classroom and learn new ways to use Twitter and Diigo with my students. However, the session that had the most impact on my teaching was entitled Using Technology To Build a Culture of Inquiry by Chris Lehmann of the Science Leadership Academy (SLA).
Chris shared the model they use at SLA and how they motivate students to take ownership of their learning. He spoke about personalization and giving the students a choice. Learning has to be meaningful for those doing it or it's really not learning, but regurgitating. Students need to be empowered so they don’t just sit and listen, but actually doing something with it in the end. Chris also shared, in my opinion, the most powerful question teachers can ask their students...What do you think? Ask the kids and then take shared action.
I was excited to learn more about how the Science Leadership Academy gets students to take ownership of their learning. I watched a TEDTalk by Chris Lehmann Education is Broken that discussed the importance of teaching to interest and passion instead of berating students with a lot of useless knowledge that most may never use. I also watched as Diana Laufenberg Embrace Failure spoke about authentic experiences and posing problems for students to solve rather than giving them the answers and asking them to repeat it. The other day I read a blog post Homework that Motivates by Scott Carr. He used words like ownership, autonomy, open-ended experiences, and creating connections.
All of these have the same message. Let’s teach kids how to learn with authentic problems that they are interested and passionate about. Let’s make the students the center of their learning and switch the focus away from the teacher. Teach them that it’s okay to make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and keep striving toward their goal. With all the information available to us at our fingertips, we no longer have to bog our students down with memorizing trivia and information they may never use.
The message I took away from the movie tonight was one of hope. Not only for the dolphin, but for the boy. The boy was fatherless and failing school. Instead of sitting through summer school to learn about all the things he wasn’t interested in learning before, he instead learns how dolphins communicate, befriends and learns from doctors, then organizes a campaign complete with website, webcam, and festival. Now I know that this is Hollywood and most of Hollywood is fictional, but I also know that if we give students a voice and give them authentic learning experiences, great things can happen.
This upcoming school year, I am challenging myself to make learning more authentic for the students I teach. Maybe you can do the same.
The title of this post sounds like something my daughters would say after I’d ask them to empty the dishwasher for the 3rd time. However, it is in fact, what I hope to do a lot more this year. I started blogging a year ago and turned out two of the most wonderfully intense, thought provoking blogs I have ever written. I wrote, edited, rewrote, edited some more, and after what seemed like a month and a half, I had a 3 paragraph blog I finally felt good about posting. My excitement about blogging waned and, up to the point where I hit the Publish button for this blog, those remained my only two (but wonderfully thought provoking) blogs to date.
I just returned from ISTE12 and feel rejuvenated and excited about blogging once again. I hope that this time will be different. I went to several sessions where educational bloggers discussed their first blog posts and the importance of just getting your thoughts down for no one else but yourself. They don’t have to be long, serious, or even intensely thought provoking. In fact, they don’t even have to be about education, however, I don’t think I will try this anytime soon. One prominent edublogger discussed having a humorous thread running through his blogs. .On the ride home from San Diego to Phoenix with my good friend and colleague, we discussed blogging about day to day events that happen in the classroom.
Now I don’t think that a year from now I will have 367 blog posts to my credit, but I do hope to have more than 3!
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