Changing Times: Leadership Shift

Changes are happening in ECC this fall!

The ECC team will be welcoming Errin Gregory as the new ECC leader. Errin comes with a wealth of experience in both the classroom and digital world. Over the past two years, it has been a pleasure to work alongside, collaborate with and learn from Errin every day. Her innovative practice, collaborative mindset and research-driven pedagogy has been appreciated by team members and students alike.

I am shifting from ECC into Connected Classrooms 8 and will be leading this branch of Connected Classrooms in the fall. A component of my new job is now the district Technology Collaboration teacher, so I hope to keep close ties to to project and the colleagues that have brought me such fulfillment over the past three years.

We will also keep you posted as the position for the third ECC member is filled, and will soon be welcoming a new team member to the ECC family.

Congratulations, Errin!

Connected Classrooms 2011-2012

What are your favourite memories of Connected Classrooms this year?
What did you enjoy the most?

Growing Innovations Prezi

Our prezi to share about Connected Classrooms for our Growing Innovations Learning Symposium.http://prezi.com/vozxkyo7q0q8/connected-classrooms-in-sd74/

Impact of ECC on student engagement

This writing is cross-posted at my professional blog, Just a Thought, as it pertains to my writing and learning in that space as well.

Starting with today

I looked through the doorway during a lesson this morning, peeking out to see what the group of students outside was doing. I could see what looked like a huddle of nine boys, all squeezing in around the one student holding the camera. They were watching the playback of a video clip they had just filmed. As I watched, the Aboriginal Student Support Worker supervising students working outside caught my eye. She smiled and said "they're sure having fun!" As she spoke, the group suddenly broke apart, smiles on every face. They started running toward the classroom, having completed their video clip, ready to upload it to a netbook. Each student looked energized, happy, and motivated. They were fully engaged in their learning.

To put this in context, we started a multimedia unit last week in the Connected Classrooms. Today I introduced software for creating and editing videos. After a 15 minute lesson introducing the learning intentions, software and a quick review of royalty-free audio sites from the week before, I set students free to explore, create and direct their own learning.

That was when the learning started to get messy.

By messy, I mean that some students immediately went over to grab a camera and start filming video clips. One group of students began taking photos for a stop motion animation film. Several students opened up the royalty-free music sites from the week before and started downloading audio. Many students decided to try out the software for themselves and started creating a slideshow right away.

There were students working alone, lost in their own world of multimedia exploration, other students worked with a partner and learned from each other as they went along, and still other students working in small groups. Students were inside, outside, in the back room, out in the hallway and working in the room next door.

I could barely finish up with one student before another came up with an urgent question – How do I upload the video onto my flashdrive? How do I download this song? Where are all the cameras because we need one? – and on and on and on. The students wanted to know, needed to know, the answers so they could get on with creating their multimedia pieces. No hesitation to ask questions from this group.

And that was just the students in my classroom at Cayoosh. Watching the screen from time to time, I could see most of the students in Ashcroft and Lytton at their computers, but I wondered how many of my other students in those places were off with cameras and ideas during the connection. I also wondered if there were any questions from those students afar, but, thankfully, as both of my Connected Classroom colleagues are extremely tech-savvy when it comes to multimedia, I was confident that they were able to answer all questions at their sites.

It was a great class and the learning only stopped because lunch arrived. Students didn’t want to stop. They procrastinated when it came time to finish up – just let me download this one last song, I just need to get the photos off the camera, I want to show my friend the video I made – please Ms G? When I turned the microphone on to finish up the connected lesson with all three sites, I felt as if I was interrupting all the students. The Ashcroft and Lytton students seemed completely engaged as well. The chorus of “Goodbye!” was quieter than usual, and my guess is that students were so into the multimedia activities that our closing farewell faded in importance, a rare and unusual occurrence.

How has connected classrooms impacted student engagement?

Which brings me back to the original question: how has connected classrooms impacted student engagement in my classroom? Even reflecting solely on today’s lesson, there are so many ways to answer this question. There are the obvious answers based on the latest research focused on student engagement in schools. During the connected lesson, students were focused and on task. They wanted to keep going and didn’t want to stop and disengage from their activities. They took the initiative to ask questions and move beyond the walls of the classroom to get the photos or video footage they needed. They were animated, energetic and brought that ‘edge of chaos’ feeling to the learning environment that seems productive and alive.

Multimedia

Going beyond a quick study of student cues, I would argue that learning in an environment in which multimedia and new technologies are simply embedded into everyday activities is highly engaging for students. Our students have a variety of multimedia equipment available to learn with and from. The students constantly engage with multimedia content; showing them how to create multimedia themselves is of interest to them. They want to learn it. It is relevant to their lives. And in the Connected Classrooms, with resources and people to help, students couldn’t wait to get started on multimedia creations all their own.

Digital teachers

I think that our role as ‘digital teachers’, an idea I developed during my Masters coursework, is also one aspect of the connected classrooms that impacts student engagement overall, and certainly within multimedia unit lessons like the one today. As connected classroom teachers, we create at least one multimedia project per month. The monthly news is created and shared from each site at the end of the month. While students help with this process by recording special events in photographs and video each month, the task of creating and editing the video falls to the teachers. We take this role seriously, showing students responsible, appropriate and safe ways to create and share content online.

Teacher engagement

Another way in which Connected Classrooms impacts student engagement is through teacher engagement. All three of us have choice as to what we teach. I still remember the shock I felt when my administrator asked me what I wanted to teach on my days as the lead teacher. Not surprisingly, we each teach an area that is highly interesting to us. Brooke’s passion for environmental stewardship comes through loud and clear during her Tuesday lessons on current events. Aislinn’s love of children’s literature is obvious not only in her Reading Power lesson activities, but also in her always new and interesting book choices. I love photography and multimedia and I know that my excitement passes along to the students during my Thursday lessons. Our authentic engagement with the topics we teach is obvious; the students get to learn from not one, but three people excited to share about a topic both personally and professionally important to them.

To finish

Student engagement is a tricky topic and the Connected Classroom is an extremely rich and complex learning environment so I’m quite certain I have not in any way adequately answered the Growing Innovation question, but hopefully my thoughts prompted by one lesson have at least made sense and perhaps inspired some new thinking along the way.

Working with Text

All of the students in Connected Classrooms work on a year long inquiry project. Students choose their topics at the beginning of the year, and spend Fridays focusing on their projects. The three teachers share the lead on lessons that guide students through the inquiry process and help them sift through the information they find. Lessons range from choosing topics, asking guiding questions about their topics, research methodologies, and analyzing their findings.

Students are at that time of year where they have completed the majority of their research and are beginning to synthesize and organize their information. Many students have compiled vast amounts of research and many have used online articles and text as their primary research avenue. As much of what they find is quite academic, sorting and processing text like this can be a daunting task. Much of the text is far beyond grade level, and it can be overwhelming to make sense of.

Aislinn and I have focused a few recent lessons on working with text, and have led activities that offer students strategies to use when dealing with difficult, academic text.

On Tuesday, I led a lesson using an AVID text marking strategy, where students read an article together as a class, and during each reading, students utilized a different text marking tool. Initially, they highlighted main ideas, followed by writing connections and questions on the margins and all over the page. During the videoconference, students from all three sites shared the information they found most valuable, what connections they made, and what questions the text left them with.

Today’s Aislinn’s lesson focused on a different strategy that could help student in dealing with the text they may encounter during the inquiry research project. Aislinn had students work on utilizing text features to organize information, and recognizing how they could transfer their knowledge of text features when processing their research.

Here are a few examples of students working with text in preparation for their inquiry projects:

Leadership in ECC

In a recent assignment for one of Master’s courses I was asked to look at leadership, curriculum and their connections.  Before starting this assignment I decided to have a discussion with my students about these two topics.  When I asked the students about leadership they listed off people that you would expect to hear, such as the teacher, principal, and a coach.  One student stated that they could be a leader as well, that leaders were not just adults.  When I asked the students what they thought curriculum was the first thing students said was Connected Classrooms.

It was the discussion on curriculum that really got me thinking about how much of a role Connected Classrooms plays in daily classroom life.  The Connected Classroom lessons cover many different areas including reading, writing, oral language, fine arts, technology, career and health development, as well as science and social studies in some projects.  From Moodle, to shared lessons, to the inquiry projects, Connected Classrooms has become the new curriculum of these three classrooms. 

Later in the day, during a Connected Classroom lesson, I looked around the room and noticed all of the leadership skills students had developed as a result of this Connected Classrooms curriculum.  The students had taken total control of the lesson that day.  The lead student had set up and turned on all of the equipment, was leading the discussion and moving around the room to allow other students to share, and was running the classroom laptop to share out the work that we had done.  As the lesson continued I saw students trying new computer programs, students teaching and helping others with their PowerPoints, and sharing information with each other on their research projects.  I was amazed at the leadership the students were demonstrating, and the confidence they were showing with that leadership.

The students see the learning and activities they do in this new curriculum as being some of the most important, and most enjoyable, that they do in the day.  Looking around the room and seeing the learning that is happening, it is hard to disagree.

ECC Visitors

A few weeks back, our Connected Classroom in Lillooet was visited by Linda Kaiser and Judy Halbert as a part of the OECD's Innovative Learning Environments project. Last year, ECC had applied to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to be among their universe of Innovative Learning Environments around the world. To get a better sense of the depth of our project, Judy and Linda joined the Cayoosh site during a video conference on digital photography and image editing.

Several students from the Lytton site actually led the lesson. Students gave a demo of the tools they were using to create their digital compositions, then explained the processes they used to create their unique digital compositions.

We thank Judy and Linda, and the OECD, for inclusion in their universe and are excited for what that inclusion may bring!