[This post is an excerpt from my EDURO: Coaching from Theory to Practice certificate course from 2015] Every year our school picks a whole-school goal. Last year (my first year at ISZL), we were fortunate as the goal was ‘Technology’. The two PD days in February were designated to the EdTech Team to design and facilitate, and…
EDURO Coaching Challenge 1: Identify a colleague at your school that you feel comfortable working with. Initiate a dialogue with that person to see if they would feel comfortable with you practicing your coaching skills with them. [This post is an excerpt from my EDURO: Coaching from Theory to Practice certificate from 2015] I’m really…
Is it ever ‘too soon’ to take the training wheels off? “Change Tomorrow Today” is the 2017 title for our Grade 5 Exhibition at UWCSEA. But I’ve been wondering…how might teachers use this mantra in our own pedagogy? Can we change TODAY to better prepare students for TOMORROW? Although I’ve been teaching for ten years, this was my first…
Last month our school received a new shipment of BlueBots…the 2015 version of the former BeeBots. These bots have only just been released and provide the added feature of being programmable via an iPad (using BlueTooth). The bots also have a transparent cover, allowing children to see the computer inside as it works. Otherwise, it…
This week, as a belated #hourofcode (which we hosted in December), the Early Years 1 classes explored BeeBots for the first time. BeeBots is basically a programmable robot where arrows and a ‘GO’ button tell the BeeBot where to move. Introductory Video from Youtube: What is it? How does it work? The class teacher decided to take…
Field Trip to Santi Rama School for the Deaf UOI: How We Express Ourselves CI: People can create and manipulate messages to target specific audiences. To introduce ourselves to students at Santi Rama School for the Deaf…Grade 4s prepared an ASL version of Owl City’s “Fireflies”! The purpose of this trip was to build a…
Today we started the filming process with some of the students. They were very excited! After drafting their drawings, recording their explanation on Photobooth and practicing on a whiteboard, they were more than ready to get started. Practice makes perfect Seowon practices her drawing on a smaller whiteboard. She also thought about what title she…
Today during my Grade 5 EAL class, I decided to trial a new (free!) online visible thinking tool called ‘Mural.ly‘. Its claim is that it is ‘Google Docs for Visual People‘, which couldn’t better define myself or my EAL learners. Using Mural.ly with Beginner EAL students: Tuning-in to UOI vocabulary Students are able to upload…
We’ve now had a week’s buffer to think and reflect on our Grade 5 Exhibition How the World Works. What a journey it was! It seems miles away now that students and teachers have had a week’s holiday to ‘decompress’ from the long but rewarding journey! Some Challenges in review… This was definitely a challenging…
Is your blog worth reading? http://www.creativityden.com/blog/things-you-need-to-follow-to-become-a-pro-blogger/ This term we will practice more editing skills in preparation for middle school. We will use blog posts as a way to share our learning with others and a way to improve our writing. Here are some examples of the pictures you drew after the activity. What do you…
Innovative Learning 