And this is the last day!
Day 30
What would you do (as a teacher) if you weren’t afraid?
Wow, this question seems to directly respond to my last post, where I explain how I've changed in the last 7 years of teaching:
How comfortable am I in sharing who I really am? Being a teacher is a weird thing. In grad school they told us that one teacher got fired because she was tagged on facebook drinking a glass of red wine in a photo from her trip to France.
What?
I know a few teachers who divide themselves between their school personae and their personal lives. I did that for awhile when I was singing in a band. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
My biggest change was overcoming this fear. How did I know I'd beat it? Suddenly I felt free to teach what really mattered to me, and I stepped back one day and thought, "Whoa, where'd all this curriculum come from? Why wasn't I doing this earlier?"
I was afraid to do something that hadn't been done in the middle school before, and I was mostly afraid of the parents' reactions. I found out all I had to do was communicate it ahead of time.
- I led the school in a 360 degree assessment of diversity and inclusivity. The school cannot grow unless it is always reflecting on the strength of its own community.
- My childhood fascination with designing my own video games, which was hardly possible for a 12 year old in 1991, is now not only possible, but immediately gratifying! GameSalad, Gamemaker Lite, Pixel Press Floors, Unity, Source Filmmaker, and more. This is an excellent way for students to learn computer programming and digital storytelling. I unpacked one of my storage boxes from childhood and brought it to one of my classroom cabinets:
- Several education futurists praise Minecraft's educational potential. I took the risk last week and offered a project to a couple students to create a scale model of the school campus in Minecraft, which will be linked via Aurasma's GPS functionality to offer the option of jumping between the real world and the 8th-grade-student-generated minecraft world with a few swipes of a mobile device's touchscreen. I wasn't quite sure about it - I didn't trust the students fully - but I saw the progress yesterday, and OMG. The creative ways they built the soccer field goals!! The mathematical ratios they used to determine scale! When I saw the gym, I got a little vertigo walking down the hall and into the locker room of an incredibly accurate architectural rendering. At the time, they were building a machine that allowed the bleachers to open and collapse at the push of a button. Engineering!
- I'm leading a social media safety class that asks the question, "How can social media be used safely to help me reach my goals and dreams?" I was inspired by my friends who have successfully used crowd sourcing sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to do amazing things like record an album or invent a 3D printer that prints in metal. I'm able to present this to 11-year old kids, who aren't even supposed to be using social media yet. They can be guided by trusted adults on safe usage BEFORE THEY EVEN SIGN UP! Imagine that! (And many are already using it anyway - social apps are kind of the biggest deal right now)
- Projection mapping for the school plays? Didn't know how to do it but there's FREE SOFTWARE to make it happen! And tutorials on youtube!
We live in a beautiful world, and I am no longer afraid to share it in my classroom.
Also: 30 DAY BLOGGING CHALLENGE COMPLETED! Achievement get!
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