What Can Twitter Do?

The notion that in order to ‘do’ Professional Learning, you have to go away to a conference or to a workshop is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Sure, those methods of PL are still useful and beneficial, but there is a Professional Learning tool much more readily available to us at our fingertips, whenever we so desire to learn. That tool, is Twitter. While many have jumped on the Twitter PL bandwagon already, most educators don’t even have a Twitter account yet. Let me share with you the Professional Learning that I was able to accomplish on Twitter within the span of an hour:

• Thanks to @mattBgomez‘s tweet – I found a great link to 37 free online National Geographic e-books that will even read to students!
• I followed along with an #edteach chat, where I networked with @MrDKeenan and found a great idea for modelling how to have an edchat on Twitter by creating our own private hashtag to use, to get colleagues comfortable with how to follow along and participate in a chat.
• Thanks to @TechieAng, I found a new idea for an inquiry experience in my kindergarten classroom.
• I discovered a new blog to follow, written by an administrator in southern Alberta, and his journey to building 21st century competencies in our students.
• I learned of an upcoming Professional Learning/Networking opportunity in Calgary, called EdCampYYC. This is an ‘unconference’ where educators get together, and share their desires for learning by posting questions, or ideas for possible sessions to run around. There is a discussion facilitator at each session – but no “workshop leader”, it is just a group of colleagues engaging in discussion about topics or ideas that they share in common. The best part, it’s FREE! Yes, you heard me! FREE!! Not many Professional Learning opportunities come at that price (with, of course, the exception of Twitter! )
• Thanks to @jasongraham99, I found out about the next #pypchat, where the focus will be on Transdisciplinary Learning – although, this chat is on Melbourne time, so I’ll have to read the archive of the chat the following evening.
• While perusing @rvsed I found a tweet that linked me to Barry Allen’s blog on RVS’ Power to Enrich blog site that gave some insight into different inquiry projects taking place across grades and across the division.
• I messaged a fellow Kindergarten teacher in the United States about setting up our next Skype visit for our classes.

That’s the thing about Twitter – You have to potential to learn something new every day, from someone, somewhere – near or far – that shares the same passion for education that you do. It doesn’t take long, it doesn’t cost anything and you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your couch to ‘do’ Professional Learning.

My name is @JenFriske, and I am addicted to Twitter as a Professional Learning tool.

Plastic Art – visual action at its finest!

At the beginning of the school year, my kindergarteners wrote a letter to our school principal asking if we could start a plastic recycling program at our school. Along with our letter, we attached a picture of all of the plastic from one day’s worth of snack that we would be needlessly be throwing into the garbage. Our principal was very enthusiastic about our idea, and posted our letter and photo on the window into his office, for others to read as well. Eventually, one of the grade 2 classes – Mrs. Anderson’s class – saw our letter and agreed that they wanted to take action and start recycling in their own room as well. This led to a grade 5 class – Ms. Carter’s class – to take up the initiative as well.

So, with 3 classes now taking action, we brainstormed how we could bring all of our classes together and somehow make a visual impact to share with the rest of the school reflecting the amount of plastic we consume in our school. We decided to provoke our students through our Units of Inquiry – posing the question to our students, “Now What? What should we do with all of this plastic to help educate the rest of the school on the importance of recycling plastic, rather than throwing it away?” In all of our classes, we showed our students some images of recycling art – artists who use trash to create sculptures and pieces of art. In Kindergarten, our Unit of Inquiry is How We Express Ourselves. Students are exploring all of the various ways that humans express their emotions and feelings, so this project fit perfectly! We are using our art to communicate with our peers that it is important to take action and do something about the huge amount of plastic that we are throwing into the landfills.

Today was the big day! We gathered all of our classes into the common area of our school, put out our 3, overflowing containers of plastic and let the cross-graded groups collaborate, cooperate and communicate together to create their visual representation. The process was phenomenal! Listening to the conversations all around the space, and watching the cooperative working teams was just as enlightening for us teachers as it was for the students.

In the end, the students had come up with some AMAZING pieces of plastic art to display for the school. What was most incredible was the variety of ideas that were represented! From animals (a jellyfish and a dog) to structures (the Calgary Tower) and everything in between, these students produced some amazing art together – and sent a strong message at the same time (they didn’t even use all of the plastic from the 3 classes, we still have some left over).

After we came back together as a whole group to reflect on the process and hear some of their thoughts and ideas, the whole group came to the realization that this was only THREE classes worth of plastic – that means that there are about 20 other classes that do not yet recycle the plastic that they consume in their classroom. For many of the students, this was a real eye-opener to them that this is an issue that we need to address. All of our classes were buzzing afterwards, and they are very excited for other students to see their pieces of art. And they are hoping that they inspire others to take action with us!

Birdhouse                              Teacher                                  Castle

The Calgary Tower               The Eiffel Tower                          UFO

Robot                                    Train                                 Helicopter

Rocket                                       Dog                                    Truck

Jellyfish                                Tower                          Space Shuttle

Plastic Art Gallery

A new year brings all new opportunities

Well, a new year brings the opportunity to work with new students, in a new grade with a new job description! This year, I am so excited to be teaching a half time kindergarten class in the mornings and in the afternoon, I am the PYP Coordinator. This means that I get to work with not only our youngest minds, but also all of the grade teams on our staff. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with my colleagues as they develop, refine and implement their planners for our Units of Inquiry. No only that, I am thrilled that I get to work with one of the most curious bunch of little minds….kindergarteners! What a perfect age to implement inquiry-based practices. Since they are naturally full of inquisitiveness, why not teach them to start developing good questioning skills at that age? During a discussion about our names, I handed each student a card with their name on it. I asked them to observe their name – we had already discussed that the word observe means to look at something carefully – then tell me what they wonder about it. It took a few prompts, but eventually the questions started coming. “I wonder why some of the letters are bigger than others?” “I wonder if my name is the longest in the class?” “I wonder why we use letters of the alphabet to spell our names?” By setting them up with the prompt, “I wonder…” I felt that their questions had more depth to them.

The four and five year old minds are fascinating things. They are like little sponges! They absorb everything at a rate that is incredible, and with very little repetition, it begins to stick! From day one in my kindergarten class, I began using the vocabulary that is common across the grades in the Primary Years Programme. I introduced this during the lead up to centre time. We talked about some of the attitudes that we need to show during centre time:

showing Respect, Creativity and Cooperation

We also talked about some of the attributes (who we are) that will make centre time successful:

being Caring, Principled, Thinkers and Communicators

Every day, we discuss what each of these words mean (in Kindergarten-friendly language) and what it would look like during centre time. By day 5, all I had to do was ask what attitudes and attributes we must have, and as a group, they came up with all of the words (using the correct vocabulary) on their own and were able to explain what the words meant. You can only imagine the HUGE smile on my face!

The potential for learning these young students demonstrate on a daily basis amazes me! And I feel so fortunate to be able to play a part in shaping their minds for all of the years ahead of them. I am so excited for what the year holds in both areas of my new job description!

An energizing inquiry opportunity as the year wraps up

After reading the book, Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv last year, it struck me how differently (or not at all) kids today interact with nature compared to when I was growing up. My fondest childhood memories stem from the times when I was outside exploring, playing and being a part of nature. It would be such a shame for this to be lost on our ever increasing tech-savvy, plugged-in generation that we are teaching today.

I brought this concern to my grade three team a couple of months ago, when we were beginning to plan our final unit of inquiry for this year, Sharing the Planet. I wanted to re-connect our students to nature. It started innocently as saying, “I want to try to get my class outside a little bit more for this last unit” and since then, it has spiraled into something that could become incredible.

Since the day that I brought my concerns up to my team, we have had a wonderful man by the name of Steve, who works for the Rocky View Schools Grounds Department come out to initially talk to us about our ideas and ambitions. He was on the same page as us, that if this was going to take off with the students, it had to be student-driven. Sure, it would be easy for him to come out and plant some more foliage on the school grounds, or bring out some wood so that we could start constructing a school vegetable garden, but who would be the ones to end up taking care of everything? Certainly not the students if they had no involvement from day one of even thinking about the idea. So through our class discussions, we talked about what it means to be a steward, and why it’s important to be as knowledgeable as we can about things like, where does our food come from? Why should we plant gardens with plants that are native to the area? Through these discussions, we invited Steve out to the school again, only this time, he was going to take the students out on a tour of the school grounds to talk about some of the greenery that was planted around the school, what their function are, and why they chose those plants in particular. For some of the students, the look in their eyes just when they were able to touch the spruce tree needles, or pick up a pine cone and inspect it carefully, or split open the small fruits from the wild rose plant from last year that didn’t fall off and realize that they can see the seeds inside…it was all so foreign to them! It was amazing to watch. The questions and wonderings that they generated were truly rooted in a genuine keen interest in learning more. The Hook!

While Steve took questions from the students, I slowly raised my hand. He called on me next and I asked him, “I noticed from our classroom, when we look out the window, there is a burm behind the school that only has a few little trees planted in it. They don’t appear to be thriving very well” Steve’s response was, “Yes, but I noticed the weeds are thriving very well back there!” So I continued by asking, “Is there are reason why there is nothing growing out there?” Steve told the students that a few years ago, the burm was put there so that a grade group could do something with it, but that it never panned out, so it’s just stayed the same since then. Of course, one curious voice chimes in, “Could we do something with it?” Steve eagerly acknowledged this question and said, “Of course! I’d be more than happy to help you out with that!” So I asked the whole group, “Grade three’s, who might be interested in taking this on and making that burm as beautiful as the front of our school grounds?” The hands shot up like wildfire! Excitement buzzed around the kids.

And I have to share…somehow…I cannot for the life of me remember how it was brought up (through all of the excitement, I must have missed a question or a comment), but the topic of rhubarb came up. Steve asked the kids how many of them had ever tried rhubarb. Of the approximately 55 kids outside, 3 of them put up their hands. I was shocked! So was Steve! So of course the questions come streaming…what does it taste like? What does it look like? Is it a berry? What colour is it? After our time ran out with Steve, I took my class back to our room, and I sat them down at the carpet. I told them that I still couldn’t believe that so few of them had never had the opportunity to try rhubarb. I continued to explain that when I was their age, one of my most vivid memories of summer was when my friends and I would raid my Grandma’s rhubarb patch, find the brightest red, most succulent smelling pieces of rhubarb, grab a bowl of sugar and head out to the park. We would lay in the grass near the merry-go-round (don’t even get me started that most of them didn’t know what that was!), pour the sugar in our belly buttons, watch the clouds float by and talk about all of the animals we could see in the clouds, as we dipped our rhubarb in the sugar in our belly buttons and ate it all. The kids were fascinated by this. So now, they all want to try rhubarb. They have decided that they want to plant, grow and eat rhubarb!

Of course, our talk was ended abruptly by the end-of-the-day bell, but as the students packed up and left the room, I could hear them meeting up with their friends from other classes, telling them about the childhood summer experience that Mrs. Friske had and how cool it was. Spreading the word, getting other students excited about the idea of, “Hey! we can plant our own food and gardens so we can experience these things too.”

We are now into the research stage. In class, we wrote down all of the burning questions that they had about Steve’s visit, the plants that he talked about, what would work well in the burm behind the school, keeping in mind that we are trying to be environmental stewards, so researching plants that are native to our area, not introducing invasive species that will take over and require a lot of work to maintain. Once the students have made their list of plants that they think will works, we will contact Steve again to see if he’s in agreement, and then we’ll get the ball rolling. I hope it continues to roll with these students as they move up into grade 4!

Playtime with a new tool!

My favourite time of the school day….playtime!

In my previous blog post, I talked about how as teachers, we cannot be afraid of new technologies or tools, and that the best way to learn is to take the time to play. Well, it’s also important to practice what we preach. My school division is in the middle of a pilot project to incorporate MindMeister into our classrooms. Upon receiving the email in my inbox looking for teachers to pilot the mind-mapping tool, I instantly jumped on the opportunity! While I have used other mind-mapping tools that were good, they now feel limited in their capabilities. Students could only create mind maps at school, they can’t work on them at home even if they save it on their jump sticks because they don’t have the software at home and they are not collaborative. This is where MindMeister comes in! It offers students an opportunity to access their mind maps from anywhere as long as they have an internet connection, as well, they can share their maps digitally with others in order to collaborate and create the maps together in real-time.

Today was my students’ first opportunity to try out MindMeister, and to say it was a success would be an understatement! All I wanted them to do way play; discover how to create nodes, move the nodes around, change themes, change font size/colour. They all had it figured out in about 15 minutes flat!

So, on the fly, I asked them to create a personal mind map about the concept of rights and responsibilities, which is part of our current Unit of Inquiry, How We Organize Ourselves. This involved them creating nodes to talk about what our rights are as Canadian citizens, and then adding sub-nodes to list the responsibilities that we have that go along with those rights. Even my most reluctant writers were flying! Since they are just being introduced to the concept of rights and responsibilities, this initial creation was moreso to see what their prior knowledge on the topic was. The beautiful thing about it (and that I discussed with the students) is that it is now a working document, and as we move through the Unit as they discover more about rights and responsibilities, they can add to or modify their mind-map. A neat feature on MindMeister is the “History View”. This offers an animated timeline view of the creation of the map and how it changes. It even logs the different dates that items are removed/added. It’s a great way for the students to see how their mind map will grow and change in unison with their knowledge and understanding.

Playtime in action

What an 8 year old is capable of with a little playtime

I cannot wait to see what these maps look like once we integrate the collaboration piece of MindMeister! And what a great opportunity for my students to reflect back on their work at the end of the unit to watch their knowledge grow right before their eyes!

Taking the time to keep up.

As I sit in my comfy chair on this Saturday morning, sipping my coffee, browsing my twitter feed, I came across a tweet, linking to a blog written by Kathy Cassidy titled Why my Six-Year-Old students have digital portfolios. Within that blog, I read a section that resonates so deep within me, that I had to re-write it out (and it was too long to tweet!) somewhere. So here it is:

“We teach kids that have no concept of a world without the Internet. Technology is a ubiquitous part of their world. They want and expect to use it at home. For me to deny that technology and what it allows them to do would be like asking someone from an earlier generation to learn without a pen or pencil. It just wouldn’t make sense.”

So…why the resistance in schools (or teachers) to provide these technologies to our kids? The obvious answer is that, we as teachers are not knowledgeable enough about the technologies (and their capabilities) ourselves to feel comfortable passing that knowledge on to our students. But like it or not, our students will – somewhere, at some point – have access to technology. They are very capable at a very young age to be able to navigate many variations of technology. We need to keep up! We need to be able to teach our students how to access and use these technologies responsibly at a young age.

Like our students, the only way for us to learn how to use different forms of technology, is to take the time to learn by PLAYING! It’s not a scary as it seems. Blogs, wikis, digital portfolios, cloud based applications, Twitter, Facebook…they are not designed in a way to make it difficult to learn how to use them, in fact, they are all pretty user-friendly. You just have to play around and see what you can do with them. The biggest component, I feel, is just devoting the TIME to that. As teachers, our time is spread pretty thin, however if we REALLY want to allow our students to reach their full potential…we have to be willing to take some time to learn about what that entails.

In my school, We are in the application phase of becoming an International Baccalaureate, Primary Years Programme school. A component of the programme is that every student must have a portfolio that will travel with them through their years in the school. Digital Portfolios are the way we are going. The only way for me to learn about how to implement these portfolios into my classroom is to start learning about, and playing within the platform which we will be using (ePearl). I can’t be afraid to start. As well, taking the time to research how other teachers have successfully implemented digital portfolios into their own classrooms. I don’t want to be just one step ahead of my students when it comes to teaching them about technology, I want to be ten steps ahead. So if that means giving up some of my own time to learn how to do that, I know that that is what I signed up for when I came into this profession. The world of technology is moving too fast for any teacher to think its alright to keep their head in the sand and not allow for opportunities for their students to have any exposure to it. It is a disservice to their generation.

I am CRAVING to learn how others have implemented digital portfolios into their classrooms. So, as I sit here, in my comfy chair on this Saturday morning, sipping my coffee, I will continue to read my twitter feed, and find blogs on the topic from other educators to read that will get me one more step ahead.

Digital Citizenship – teaching the concept of plagiarism early on

In my last entry, I talked about using the Form function in Google Docs. When I presented the Form to my grade three students, I posed the question to them, “Where can we go to find an image that we can use to best represent our understanding of our Central Idea?” Of course, the hands shot up and the answer on everyone’s tongue was, “GOOGLE!!!” Not surprising! I know I’ve been guilty in the past of needing to find an image to share, so off to Google I went. I typed in my search, find image, copy image, paste image, done! No citing of the source, no checking to make sure it wasn’t a copyrighted image. I wasn’t taught in school that I have to pay attention to those sorts of things. Heck, I don’t even think I was taught how to copy and paste an image into a document! Oh, how times have changed!

So…we needed to take a step back, and revisit the concept of plagiarism (we have talked about plagiarism already this year in the sense of copying words directly from a book). In order to be a digital citizen (again, we have already talked about what it means to be a citizen in a community), there are certain expectations of us. One of those expectations is that we give credit where credit is due, even when we are using images. Someone has taken (and owns) that picture, and if we don’t give them credit for it, it is the same as copying someone’s words and using them as our own.

Luckily, there are some copyright-friendly image websites that we can use, where photographers have kindly given their permission for people to use their images! It is also (in my opinion) safer than just allowing kids to hop on to Google, type in their search query and see all of the wonderful** (and non-relevant) images that can pop up with even the slightest spelling or grammar error (or sometimes, even without those errors).**I hope you sense my sarcasm in the use of the word “wonderful”

One of the websites that I have used is Pics4Learning, where all of the images are categorized into different topics that students can navigate through. It is very easy to use, and the kids love browsing the pictures according to their interests. Another site that was introduced to me by Brenda Dyck (at the same workshop where I learned the beauty of the Form) is Flickr Storm. The trick with this site is that not all of the images are copyright-friendly. So when you type in your search query (say, architecture for example), you must click on the “advanced” tab, and then from the drop down menu, select the “Non-commercial & No Derivatives” option (this means that the images are not for commercial use and will not be used in any other manner). This will then show you only the images that are provided by photographers that are copyright-friendly.

I want to get the students out of the habit of relying on Google to find images, and get them into the habit of recognizing their responsibilities for proper use of the internet and their role in digital citizenship. By showing them different sites where they can access images (legally!), I hope to instill in them that principled behaviour as they move up in the grades and into their adult lives, as it will be something that they will no doubt, continue to use throughout their lives.

If you have any other websites for images that are copyright-friendly that you would like to share, please feel free!