My Education Passport

For my Method's class we were asked to create something to depict our philosophy of education. The following is what I created and wrote:

Trying to find a way to describe my philosophy of education in a succinct, yet creatively ‘me’ way was a challenging endeavor. My mind sprang to ideas of creating a painting of some kind because since coming to Brock University my passion for art and creativity has been re-ignited. But I was unsure what to paint, so I started thinking of creating an interactive multimedia representation, as I am part of the Educational Technology Leadership cohort. However, I still felt at a loss for how to encapsulate my personal teaching philosophy. I then began thinking about how much I love traveling, and how it has influenced my life and values. I began sharing these ideas with my friend Adam Childs (Twitter: @adamajchilds )who is a Junior-Intermediate student at Brock in my Cohort who shares a similar thirst for travel. As we talked more about this I came up with the idea of a passport to represent our journey. Then Adam came up with the idea of making actual stamps to reflect our personal development. Together we enthusiastically collaborated in creating our own passports representing our respective journeys through education, and experiences that have influenced our teaching philosophies.

Cooperative learning is one of my principle beliefs in learning, which is why I was so thrilled to work on this project with Adam. Together we came up with ideas on how to create the passport, which individually we would not have been capable of. By working cooperatively in designing the layout with individual responsibilities, we were able to embody cooperative learning whilst creatively creating our passports. This tangible object was created through both artistic and multimedia design (Adobe Photoshop) – both the original strategies I hoped to build upon. Working together made this such an enjoyable experience, and we were able to build off each other’s ideas and enthusiasm. I strongly believe that if you want to ‘talk the talk – you have to walk the walk’. What I mean is if you say you are all for cooperative learning, then you have to want to do it yourself, or else there is no way you will be able to sell it to the students as a learning approach. Students will see right through your transparent motives if there are not authentic. I am honestly over the moon with how the final product turned out. It is far better than I could have imagined, and I absolutely love the feeling of having achieved something, and gone above and beyond your expectations. I owe a lot of this to Adam and to the process of cooperation, as I find when you work cooperatively and succeed, being able to celebrate that accomplishment along someone else is that much more satisfying.

I found it very inspiring creating this passport because it prompted me to take a step back and reflect on what I have learned since arriving at Brock five months ago, and what events in my life have inspired me to be who I am today. One of the strongest realizations I have had is how much of a kinesthetic and visual learner I am. I love getting involved, hands-on, creative environments. This is why I was so involved in sports and the arts as a child. I was speaking to my Mom about this the other day, and she told me that when I was a child I would study by walking around the room; that I was always moving. This reminded me of Sir Ken Robinson’s speech about creativity; and I have set a personal goal to teach with this in mind. I want to teach in a classroom that thrives on creativity, cooperation, and active engagement. I want to create a safe and inspiring learning environment, built around the principles of Tribes and energizers. I want my students to learn through authentic problem solving tasks, which I organize through the input of students. I want my classroom to be a twenty-first century inclusive classroom where students want to learn because they enjoy it – not because they have to. This is what I strive to create, who I strive to be, and the journey I strive to travel on – with my passport in hand filling up with more and more stamps as I continue along my educational journey.

Google+ in the Classroom

On January 27th my cohort put on the Educational Technology Showcase at Brock University in Hamilton. This showcase ran three sessions over the day throughout the school on different ways to integrate and teach with technology in the classroom. It was a fantastic event that attracted more than 400 in attendance. I was fortunate enough to be a presenter alongside my friends Adam Childs and Natalie Gilbert on "Google+ in the Classroom". This was such a wonderful experience, and was so enjoyable. We presented in the Google room where there were six centres set up and the attendees rotated through our tables to get a quick 15 minute introduction to the topic. We decided to focus on three aspects of Google+: Circles, Hangout, and Integration with the Google Family.

Circles are effective in creating literacy learning circles, school council circles, parent circles, student circles, TLCP, etc. By doing so it allows you to control who see's what information, and communicate more efficiently with your students, peers, parents, support staff, etc. An example of how a literacy learning circle could work is to have the students create a circle, where they can share information such as youtube videos, interesting articles, questions, idea's, etc; and all can comment and work collaboratively together through this. The benefit of circles is you control the privacy of the information. This is very important due to the vulnerability of information and students, therefore this added safety allows you to share information with only who you want. For example, a conversation with a parent is a private conversation, and should not be privy to others. To highlight this, if you post something on someone's wall in Facebook, everyone who is a friend of that person can see it. In Google+, you can control this completely. Moreover, no one knows what circles you have - it is only viewable to you as a means of organization.

The benefits and flexibility of Google Hangout allows up to 10 participants in an online video conference. Unlike Skype where you can only chat to one other person, Google+ allows you to chat with up to 10 participants simultaneously. We see this as an excellent way to have students conference on projects, meet with parents outside of school hours (increased flexibility), have school staff meetings (if someone is home sick they can still participate), or discuss questions with students outside of school hours. To be clear with these outside school hours, you would set up guidelines on when you are available with all the stakeholders. This will improve transparency, and will avoid any misunderstandings. Another benefit is you can use screenshare, which allows the other video participants to view your screen to share video's, word document ideas, or anything else you wish to share. There is also the chat feature on the sidebar for those without functioning video camera's to participate with.

Google+ works seamlessly with all other Google products. You can easily incorporate, embed, and link to all other Google products in Google+, for instance add a doc, form, blogger, YouTube clip, or calendar. In our session I focused on discussing the benefits of the Calendar whereby you can create and share multiple different online calendar's with whomever you like. What I like about this is you would not want to share your calendar with colleagues, parents, and students that has your friend's birthday party on it, or a dentist appointment. So by creating say a "School Staff Calendar" and only sharing that with your school staff that calendar could include staff meetings, emergency meetings, school PD days, fundraising days, etc. Moreover, you could create a "Classroom Calendar" that includes when you have a math quiz, a field trip to the library, parent-teacher conferences, sports events, or online availability for additional help. This calendar could be shared with your students, parents, teachers, and administrative staff. This will create terrific transparency for what is going on in the classroom, and help parents be more aware of their child's learning.

It was a terrific experience presenting on this topic, and my co-presenter's and I learned so much. As the day progressed we started thinking of new and creative ways to use Google+ as a home base for all other Google products. An analogy I thought of was Google+ is the parents, and all the other Google products are the children and relatives that come home and share every once and while. So documents, presentations, flickr, blogger, etc, all are independent and grown up living their own lives; but they come home for a great Sunday lunch every week to share their ideas.

The Showcase had such an amazing atmosphere and buzz in the air, and I'm so thrilled I was able to be a part of it. It was fantastic walking around seeing all the different learning and centres going on, and hearing all these new ideas being discussed with such enthusiasm. I'm so proud of my fellow cohortian's who also presented at the Showcase, and cannot wait to take these ideas into the classroom.

If anyone has any other idea's on ways they have used Google+ in the classroom, or experiences on how to scaffold it I would be very interested in hearing about them. Cheers!