ECC Winter Gathering

A short while ago, students in ECC travelled to Lillooet for our second Elementary Connected Classrooms Gathering of the Year. Each site hosts one gathering a year, and this time the Grade 4/5 class from Cayoosh hosted the event. Travelling between the sites helps to give the students a hint of the community contexts for each site, and an aspect of their community life is highlighted each visit. In October, students travel to Ashcroft for our annual visit to the Desert Hills pumpkin patch, in the winter students look forward to skating and swimming at the Recreation Center in Lillooet, and the year end gathering wraps up in Lytton at the Kumsheen Rafting Resort grounds. These gatherings are an opportunity for students to develop deeper relations with the students they have come to know through videoconferencing, monthly news videos, and moodle work.

The excitement on the bus was palpable the morning of the trip, and my students had been looking forward to this day for a very long time. The travellers were welcomed with giant signs made by the ECC class at Cayoosh and many welcoming faces. Students had a blast swimming, skating,chatting, and taking photos with their ECC counterparts from other sites. Moodle was buzzing with messages about the trip between students for several days.

A great day was had by all!

Learning about community from interrupted learning

Something happened during the ECC lesson today that made me think, made me stop. As it centers on the notion of community, I think it's the perfect way for me to enter into this space. So, get comfy, settle in. Here's my story...

Being Thursday, it was my turn to lead the ECC lesson. I started the lesson on image editing. I was fully 'on' as an ECC teacher. My students were fully in connected mode as well, meaning, for today's lesson anyway, students were sitting at their own desks, netbooks out but not open, listening and showing the respectful quiet needed to allow the audio to go out clearly from my microphone. From the views onscreen, I could see that I had the interest of Lytton and Ashcroft students too. The lesson seemed to be going well.

Twenty minutes into the lesson, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man walk into my classroom. The TA walked with him through to the back of the room preventing an interruption so I continued with the lesson. I didn't know the man, but I didn't stop teaching. I think I paused a little, or maybe tripped over my sentence slightly. It wasn't, however, the man's entrance that tripped me up. It was that I noticed something as I continued to teach, something that made me stop, if only for moment, and pay attention.

What struck me was the students' reaction to the man's arrival. To those students in my room, it seemed an intrusion. His entrance, albeit very respectful, interrupted them. When I noticed their reactions, which were, thankfully, fleeting and respectful, I was reminded of something.

During my graduate coursework last year, an unknown person had walked through the room that my cohort was studying in. Even though no one had said anything to the person, it was obvious from the body language that the person was intruding into our space. Afterwards, my prof had talked about how she was pleased with our reaction. She said that the person seemed an intruder to us, and that our reaction showed her that we had come together as a close community of learners. It wasn't that we were rude or uninviting (we weren't), it was more that we had, by that time, become a solid group and that the unexpected appearance of a stranger in our midst was obvious to us and to anyone watching us. Had we not been such a cohesive group, a stranger walking through would have been just another unknown person, like others in the room.

Let me at this point explain our unannounced guest from today. The man's entrance was not rude, or intentionally interruptive. He was respectful, unobtrusive, and supposed to be there. He was, in actuality, the TOC coming in to cover me so I could have release time to write this blog post. As it was his first time as a TOC in my classroom, he had arrived a bit early which showed, in my opinion, good professional judgement.

Why was this of value to the ECC and our collective learning in this space? What did I learn from this? From the little pause that tugged at my attention at the time?

The TOC's appearance and the students' reactions showed me that we are at this point, indeed, a community of learners in the ECC. When we are fully 'on' in ECC mode, we are a shared community. Unannounced visitors can cause subtle, but noticeable intrusions to our learning environment. The students identify with their peers and other teachers on the screen, people they rarely see face to face and who are so geographically far away, more than an unknown person physically walking into the room.

Furthermore, while students in Lytton and Ashcroft may not have even noticed the TOC arrive today, it was only the quick actions of the TA that saved the disruption from spreading to all sites because you can be sure that if I'd had to speak with him myself, learning in all three classrooms would have been interrupted. Not that we don't experience interruptions in lessons, we do, but they are internal interruptions, created by those of us in the ECC. They are a normal part of our shared community different from an outside interruption into our learning environment.

Even after teaching in the ECC for almost two years, I often wonder about teaching in such an innovative way, about how to create a community of learners in three separate places at once, about how to reach students through a video camera to create a learning relationship that exists only through technology.

Today, for a split second, thanks to an unannounced stranger, it all crystallized into a simple, valuable understanding that makes all the effort, questions, strategies, time and pedagogical stretching worth it.

Online Literature Circles

This past week, we’ve launched our second set of books for our online literature circles. This is always one of my favourite times in Connected Classrooms!

This year, we’ve chose survival as our over-arching theme for this years lit circles. Each time we introduce a new book set, we launch with book talks. Each teacher book talks their three choices for this set during a videoconference, and fields questions about the books. Students are eager to get their hands on the new books, and it’s fantastic to have such genuine excitement for books. The bin has been sitting in my office for a week, highly coveted, and students are keen to begin their new reading adventures.

Students in the project are responsible for responding at least once a week to the deep thinking question their book leader has posted on moodle in their reading forums. During each new set, the teachers each lead and moderate a forum for three books. In many forums, students often begin their own discussion threads, and it has led to some very interesting online conversations. Students work at their own pace; some students finish a book within days and are on to the next, while others may take several weeks. We also offer the option of audio books for many of the books in our book bins, and this makes challenging text accessible to multiple levels of readers.

This set is a combination of decades-old classics, science fiction/fantasy, comedy, aboriginal content and Canadian literature.

Digital Art Workshop

This past Tuesday, January 24^th, Elementary Connected Classrooms welcomed Chris Bose, an N’lakapamux artist, musician and storyteller to our classrooms! Our guest had never presented via videoconferencing, and he was almost as excited as the kids, and enjoyed seeing the faces at Ashcroft and Cayoosh over the video screen. The Lytton students taught Chris how to use the Smartboard, and the day began.

Since September, we have participated in Errin’s lessons on digital photography and she has recently taken our students into the world of photo editing. It was a perfect time to have Chris, much of whose art uses Photoshop to create powerful, multi-layer images to deliver his message.

Chris joined the Lytton classroom gave a presentation of some of his work and shared some of his photography, online galleries, and videos. Students from each site had the opportunity to ask questions about his artwork, inspiration and techniques. Chris explained how his history and life experiences are reflected in his work.

After the digital presentation, students continued to explore the photo editing software, Paint.Net, installed on their personal net books. Inspired by Chris’s art, students are beginning to compose multilayered compositions using the photos they have taken throughout the year. Students are having a blast taking their photography to the next level.

Here are some shots of the day, and an image created by the students in Lytton.

Photography in ECC

Since September, it’s been obvious that one my student's favourite parts of Connected Classroom are Errin’s teaching focus on digital photography. Students were thrilled to go on weekly photo shoots based on the given principle/element of design they were focusing on. Students spent the first five months of the year working on design, composition, and learning how to use our cameras creatively. Now that our students have created a large bank of personal photos, Errin has led us into a new and exciting realm of photography: editing!

Despite the limitations of our class net books, Errin has found us software and programs that give our students a whole new realm of artistic possibilities. Students spent a great deal of time last Thursday getting comfortable and playing with Picture Manager, Picnik and Paintnet. I think my class could have played with image editing all day.

Included at the start of each lesson, students share out their compositions from the previous week’s photo shoot. I’ve found this to be a powerful connecting tool, and it’s made students really connect faces to names from the other classrooms.  My class is always eager to share their own shots, and is just as eager to see what the other class created as well. It makes us more a part of each other’s daily lives and it gives us a context of what life is like in the other communities.

This Tuesday, we are welcoming Chris Bose into our classrooms as a guest artist. We’re very excited to have him share his story, art, and perspective to the classrooms and have him inspire our digital creations.

Back in the Swing....

Perhaps as a result of post holiday brain and the time it takes to re-establish a routine, I’ve fallen behind it blog posts! Despite this, January has been a busy month already in Connected Classrooms.

The team met the second week back to school for a teacher planning day. We usually get together three to four times a year for a face to face teacher session, and these days always reinforce to me how great of a team we have! We’ve mapped out the next stages of our year long inquiry project, planned the next Connected Gathering (to be hosted by out Lillooet site), and are set to launch the next set of books in our online literature circles. It feels like Christmas driving home from the Board Office with new books, and the new book bins generally cause quite a stir in my classroom. In a week, we’ll launch with Book Talk Week, and my students have been pleading with me for an early crack at the new books. While it’s very hard to say no to a ten year old begging to read books, the excitement is growing to say the least.

Above all, it’s just great to sit down with Aislinn and Errin; I look forward to these days immensely! We communicate so frequently by email every day, that’s it’s a treat to have the human contact, too. The discussions about Connected Classrooms and the impact it’s had on our own practice and thinking are quite fascinating, and it’s no wonder why both Errin(recently graduated) and Aislinn(recently began) have focused on components of our work in their masters programs.

I’ve also noticed increased communication between my students and their Connected Classrooms counterparts in Ashcroft and Lillooet through moodle messaging. Several of my kids have moodle friends that they message quite frequently, and completely of their own accord. The instant my class logs on to moodle to post to any of the weekly forums, they check to see who has logged on from other sites.  It’s nice to see the shyness eroding!

Scattered thoughts, but a post to get me back on track nonetheless!

Shifting Practice?

Today, I had a lengthy conversation with a parent from the high school in Lytton who had asked me for a general rundown on Connected Classrooms.  We talked first about the classroom set up: what it looks like, the technology and tools our classrooms have to learn with, and scheduling/curriculum.

 She then asked me a question I’ve sometimes thought about, and have talked about informally with my other CC teachers.

 Then, she asked me if I was a different teacher because of it.

 The answer, in many ways, is yes.

 It brought me back to my first three years of teaching. I remember feeling like an island in my room, and I recall many days of survival mode. It’s pretty scary as a new teacher and without a structured mentorship program in BC, sometimes it was hard to know if I was making progress. I had never really spent much time in other teacher’s classrooms, beyond the limited breadth of my teaching practicum. I wasn’t completely sure what good practice looked like, and really lacked feedback. There were little gem moments, but most feedback came after a crisis point. As I am still a relatively new teacher(this is my sixth class), maybe I don't have a lot of experience for comparison's sake, as I've been on the ECC team for half of my short career, but I've experience notable shifting.

For me, I think the best part of teaching in Connected Classrooms has been having a window into the classrooms of my teaching colleagues. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing how they work, strategies they use, and how they respond to classroom challenges. I love watching how they plan and implement lessons, and I love finding out what inspires them.  It’s sort of like free, daily professional development. I’ve also come to realize that teachers love to collaborate, but most schools don’t have formal collaboration structures. I love that we get to plan our year together in Connected Classrooms. It’s been fantastic to have three different brains to sculpt our scope and sequence of the year, and to have multiple sets of ears to bounce feedback from. I also love that my teaching partners have been so flexible, and are able to roll with the frequent changes that exist in an elementary school.  Finally, we’ve been lucky to have had multiple opportunities to attend professional development as a team, which has left me energized and enthusiastic.

I think that ECC has opened up my room and my teaching practice in ways I never imagined, and I’m glad that I’ve had amazing teaching colleagues on the journey. I think that my growth as a teacher has far more dramatic than if I had never had the opportunity of this project, and the learning curve has been steep and fulfilling. It would hard to go back to teaching now without the team!

So, yes, I think the project has definitely changed me as a teacher, and quite possibly as a person. I think our project has served to break down walls, and has made me more willing to take risks and change what I do. I think that when we put ourselves out there to ninety students on the videoconference screen, we are in a vulnerable place. At the same time, I think this is a place where deep learning can happen.

 More thoughts to come….