Thing 29

This week's thing was exploring more options for professional development with a 21st Century Conference.  The main point of this idea was to explore videos that other educators created regarding nearly any topic in education you could think of.

For my first video, I chose to watch "Getting Started with Maker Ed."  The presenters, Jenny Lussier and Barbara Johnson, explored the topic of Maker Ed.  I chose this topic because I love the idea of Maker Ed.  It brings me back to when I was a kid, pre-Nintendo, pre-smart phone, pre-internet.  We played back in the day through use of our imagination.  We created games, stories, and dialogue out of necessity.  One of the great parts of the unit that Barbara talked about was giving kids a choice.  She let each student pick their own topic to be inventive with.  She branched out with a lot of the specials (PE, Art, Music, etc) to allow the kids different paths to go with their project.  She acknowledged that by giving choice to 25 kids, you may have 25 different projects, but "organized chaos" can be a beautiful thing!  Maker Ed also got some kids into coding.  I think coding is such a cool new(er) topic out there that allows kids to think logically to get to a point they want to get to.  There are a lot of different resources available to get kids into coding as well.  Jenny later talked about her "Cardboard Challenge" in which she has a lot of different pieces of cardboard available, and the kids have x amount of time to design a project using cardboard and tape, to see who can come up with the most unique projects.  I love that Maker Ed is making its way into more and more schools!




The second video I watched was "Connecting Classrooms Globally" by Todd Nesloney.  I chose this video because Dave Senechal, the Social Studies teacher on my team, has been doing a project the last few years called "Global Nomads."  This is where kids in his class have a series of video conferences with kids from a class in a different part of the world (Afghanistan, for example), and talk about major topics of the world.  The presenter starts off with why he thought about this topic.  As a global learner himself (using ideas from people around the world) he thought his kids would be able to take just as much away from kids around the world as well.  Kids naturally want to connect and collaborate with others, so we should foster this desire.  The first device he talked about was using Skype.  There's a Skype in the Classroom feature, that allows teachers to find people who are willing to host Skype sessions with students.  There are many different topics and people to choose from.  The next feature he talked about was Google Hangouts.  He talked about how easy it was to use, but we already knew that from our lessons in Google Hangouts earlier!  His other tool is Twitter.  He uses twitter to find celebrities, Olympic athletes, and more to interact with his students.  He talked about using something called a "Mystery Skype" in which you connect with another teacher and then later involve both of your classes to ask a series of back and forth yes/no questions with the other class.  The idea is to be the first class to guess where the other class is from.  The questions varied from "Are you in the US?" to "Is it hot year round at your school?"   The next section involved around "Classroom Champions."  This is a tool that connects Olympic and ParaOlympic athletes with classrooms in which the class is paired up with an Olympian and they go through different topics, such as fair play, teamwork, and working hard to follow a dream.  I thought it was cool to get the Para Olympians involved to show the kids how people with disabilities aren't all that different, and can still reach their dreams in sports.  I think it would be especially cool if we were able to connect with an Olympian who had North Shore connections as well!