Tag Archives: Life Long Learning

Flames With Action

I started this blog a few years ago as a way to reflect on my own teaching (learning), build a network of like minded teachers worldwide, and to have my own space to facilitate and encourage conversations about education with teachers in the building in which I worked. That was in January of 2009 a few years ago in Doha. I would say I have been fairly successful in two out of three of my goals. You can read my first post for yourself here for a more comprehensive look at my goals.

However, I have struggled with my third goal; I do not feel I have ever had a regular readership from teachers in my own building. I have not yet created a culture of blogging within our staff. I hope this post is a first step in creating spaces where our staff can interact. I hope it will spark a spate of new blogs as well. After a great in school retreat last Thursday, I hope to revisit my third goal here at my new school in Jakarta. I have emailed this post to the participants of our five hour meeting hoping to keep our conversation and inspiration going. Hi guys! Welcome to my blog. This is where I hang out, wrestle with ideas, connect with other teachers, and work on all the things we talked about last Thursday.

This post is my attempt to lure out the teachers and administrators from my school interested in creating new learning spaces and a dynamic tech infused pedagogy. Schools that are inquiry based and use technology to lead and guide student driven pedagogy. I hope that some of you will take the time to let loose some thoughts in the comment section and see if we can’t clearly articulate and enact our school’s vision.

Before I continue let me recap the main ideas from our meeting, so my regular readers have a sense of where I am coming from. Another great by-product of blogging is that I hope, teachers from my school new to blogging, will begin to see the power of being a networked teacher. I hope that you realize the fruitfulness of a blog and the conversations that can grow here, once the seed has been planted and tended ever so lightly. Let begin…

I work at a 1:1 school. We all have shiny new Macbooks and I love it. I love the freedom to do anything that strikes my fancy on a dime with my students. I am excited and inspired by the work we are doing. I am challenged on a daily basis to make sure I am not directing too much of what they do. I am realizing that technology and a 1:1 environment does not automatically lead to a inquiry based school. As a matter of fact, often it could hinder the shift. I am starting to realize that schools need focus and vision. I realize that not everyone on our campus understands what it means to be 1:! We need to be open and honest about what our staff is willing to do and learn. We need to hold our staff accountable for how they understand and implement the vision of the school. We need to train and support. We need conversations about who we want to be and how we can get there.

Through a series of manipulations, suggestions and hard work I am somehow got myself invited to a meeting where we were going to be having these exact conversations. There were about fourteen of us present: administrators, teachers from every branch of the school, and two students. We examined our vision statement, and through a google doc, answered a few questions about what it means to be a 1:1 school. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the conversation. Many of us are on the same page and have a lot to say on the subject. Here the gist of what we said:

So often we forget that our schools are filled with passionate teachers who want to learn and grow, but only need the venue and chance to do so. This meeting was a great example of that. Now I invite you to keep the momentum going. Look back at our Google Doc and synthesis what we discussed there. Add your comments on the document, process your thoughts and join me on this blog post. Leave a comment here sharing your ideas and/or excitement. Let’s find the best tools and spaces where we can join our energies and find out how to move our faculty and school forward. Learning begins with passion and curiosity; it is clear we have no shortage of either here at our school, so now we need to tend the flames with action. I would love comments from other readers as well. How have you created a tight group of passionate teachers to move your schools toward change? What advice do you have for us?

A Learner On My Hands

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We’ve been doing a lot of work with images, media and language in our classroom lately, and I while really should be writing up those projects and getting my workshop (which will be on language acquisition and digital tools) for the 21st Century Learning Conference in Hong Kong ready, I have chosen to quickly jot down one of those, “this is why we teach moments.”

We were out in Peace Park, a stunning area on our campus, taking photos today. By we, I mean my 7th grade ESL class and me. They are working on a short image based slideshow which highlights verbs. More on that in coming posts. For now, all you need to know is that they will be asked to take several pictures of their everyday habits (we are studying present tense verbs) of things they do on any given day. But rather than have them take a series of thoughtless, average, and poorly lit snapshots, I took a lesson to talk about what makes a photograph interesting. We spoke of light and angles and subjects and basically concluded that to take a nice shot, we simply need to look closely, pay attention, and tell a story with our photos. Much like poetry I reminded them, but instead of words we use images. (Again this flip-flopping is the gist of my session: Language is about expression and the vocabulary of digital media is beyond words.)

After our brief chat on how to take a decent photo verses taking a million snapshots, we headed outside. I watched them crouch down under tables, get up close to flowers, walk around and really look around them. I gave them bits of advice, but tried to stay out of their way. I came across one girl who was taking an extremely close-up shot of a flower. I quickly showed told her about and showed her the Macro setting on her camera and explained that should help with the focus.

As I was walking away, she started to jump up and down and shouted something enthusiastically in Bahasa. What? What is it? I asked. She quickly became shy and said nothing. I asked again, pleading to know. One of her friends told me that she had said, “I am really starting to love photography!”

That was it! That is why I teach, because from that excitement we will make the connection to poetry and language and a love of learning. I am no longer dealing with a student; I have a learner on my hands, and there is very little you cannot do with one of those!

What About You Dad?

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I know this blog has traditionally been used to document my teaching, but starting tonight I want to also use it to document my learning. Tonight, for the better part of the night I learned how to create an animated .gif. After seeing several great examples on DS106 blog, I was intrigued by the haunting quality of this medium to see if I could do create one myself. So I did, what I do when I want to learn something new- I played and pushed the buttons and didn’t stop till I had at least a first step.

I am not sure if I did it right, and my final product is still rough and needs nuances and lots of work, but I think I now understand the basics. Here is what I did. Please let me know where I went down a wrong path or if there is an easier way to do this any of this:

I downloaded a clip from The Breakfast Club
I shortened it down to about 3 seconds on iMovie
I uploaded it to this site called Gifninja
I opened the new animated .gif in Preview and moved half the clips to Photoshop
I used about nine of them to create my first ever animated Gif! (Tutorial on youtube)

There are a lot of things wrong with it like the pixelated tiny size. It is moving too fast with too many frames, and not so haunting, but it is a first step. Now that I know what it takes to actually create one, I can focus on finding nuance and the right scene to play more careful attention to. Next time, I will work bigger and slower. Really looking at the piece as a photograoh that barely moves, not just a slowed down film clip. I am also interested in create a animated .gif of images I take myself. Lot’s to think about.

It feels good to start the night never having done a certain thing, and end the night having created something you never thought you could. This is the nature of learning online. Everything is possible if you dedicated the time and attention it needs to learn.

Who You Callin’ A Life Long Learner?

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Is reading and acquiring knowledge really learning? That is what most adult do, so where is the creation, the higher-level thinking, the application?

That’s question I got out of bed to jot down last night, and it’s the question I hope this post begins to explore. Let me be the first to admit that I have not really thought this one out, and I hope that by the simple act of wrestling with the words I can pin down some direction to take with further. Feel free to read along, comment, and move forward with me.

There is nothing more deadening to education than the jargonization of ideas. And let’s face it learning ,seeing as it is at the core of what we do, has taken the most abuse. At my last school, we joked about looking for learning. Teachers would snigger in meetings where administrators would say with straight faces, “So what do you think learning looks like?” I get it. It is hard to define.

The term that seems to be perennially in vogue is the life long learner. We want to foster life long learning. We have teachers who are life long learners. Really? I guess I want to explore the idea that we aren’t and that we don’t.

It may look good on a brochure to say that a school’s staff is constantly immersed in learning, but the truth is most people are simply living their lives and trying to get by. Even those of us who champion the cause and bare the flag of the life long learner may simply be deluding ourselves. Are you feeling defensive yet? Good let’s get started!

I always start with Wikipedia, so let’s take a look:

Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines.

Okay, two words jump out and blip on my Bloom’s Taxonomy radar: Acquire and Synthesize. Is the amount of time we spend, acquiring new knowledge and skills, and the amount of subsequent knowledge and skills acquired in proportion to how we synthesize it? In short, what are most people doing with the raw data that pours into our readers and twitter feeds on a daily basis? How far up Bloom’s Taxonomy do most teachers take their learning? Is writing a blog post or creating a wiki enough evidence that you have learned anything? Or is it simply documentation of the data you have reattained?

I have been wracking my brain to think about the last thing I learned. The last time, I acquired new knowledge or skills, which I then applied and used to create something new. I can’t think of anything.

What’s the point you may ask? Well I want to learn something new, and I want a few of you to join me. I say I love learning, but have a hard time identifying anything I have learned in the last year. Maybe I am being hard on myself, but I would hope that if I had learned something it would have at least been exciting enough to register in my memory. No, I don’t want to read websites, or blogs and recreate the ideas in my own terms. I want to, “build a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure.” How do I do that? You are all teachers. Teach me something new?

If we are all life long learners then we need to be asking ourselves these questions. What is the last thing you learned? I am not looking for a set of data you memorized, or facts you are storing in your brain, I want to see proof. What did you create? Where is your evaluation? If you truly learned something you should have documented, created and evaluated your learning. Right? Share with me. We are all life long learners right? Show me. Teach me.

Education Lasts a Lifetime

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There are hundreds if not thousands of posts online about how teachers use or misuse Facebook. I am not a huge fan of Facebook myself; my personal opinion of the tool have flip- flopped more times than I would like to admit, but I have found it to be an easy way to keep in touch with friends who are not overly connected in other ways and with other tools.

I have recently found it a very cool tool to stay in touch with former students. You see, in the international school circuit, teachers and students lead very transient lives. We come in and out of each there lives very quickly. I have found Facebook to be great tool for not only keeping tabs on former students, but as a place I can continue to teach and learn from them

I am firm believer that we are now at a time and place where learning is happening everywhere, and both students and teachers must take advantage of the connections we make, no matter how fleeting. If I find and teach a student who is a talented writer and enthusiastic blogger in six grade, I want to be able to continue working with her for years to come.If I find students who are compassionate caretakers of the earth and active with social issues, I want them to remain active members of my network.

I guess what I am trying to say is that if we are too scared to connect with student using social media, then we are denying ourselves a crucial segment of our learning networks. I love having former students who I follow on Twitter. They sometimes leave the most insightful comments. Just today I had two great connections with former students through Facebook.

Before I share the stories, let me explain my student Facebook policy. I do not friend any current students on my Facebook profile. I have in the past, however, when moving on from a school, friended a few students who I really trusted and connected with on deeper level. There are only about five of these students with whom I stay in touch. One is now a twenty something year old women who I taught six years ago in The Bronx, and who I visited last time I was in NYC. The others were in 8th grade when I was in Malaysia and recently graduated. One recently sent me this request:

I love the fact that she trusted me enough to ask me for my advice. We have stayed in touch through blogs and Facebook since she was in eighth grade. She is a kind and brilliant young lady. She is a valuable member of my network.

My more current policy, looks like this: I have created a Mr. Raisdana fan page which I share with all students current former etc..This way, tehy cannot see my personal content, and I cannot see theirs. I use this site to share homework, articles, and try to instigate conversations between my current students and the kids I taught last year in Doha. My current kids are still a bit shy and quiet, but my students in Doha have been active staying in touch. Sometimes it is just silly catching up:

But it can also be a great tool to continue teaching kids:

So as you can see, Facebook and social media do not have to be something to be scared about. All social media is about building relationships based on openness and trust. There is no reason why we can’t create and foster long lasting teacher/learner relationships with our students. You are not going to stay in touch with every student you ever teach, but wouldn’t it be great to stay in touch with the ones who really got what you were teaching? To be able to advize, teach, and learn from them as they grow up and become adults. Life long learning, means life long relationships.

I want to thank my students for everything they have taught me and invite them to leave a comment and join the conversation.