30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 30

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

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!

30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 29

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

Day 29
How have you changed as an educator since you first started?

This is a great question!

With teaching, I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that there are a lot of "starts" - 

• I started teaching when I taught evening technical classes at an arts organization in Seattle.
• I started teaching when I began to substitute teach.
• I started teaching when I began to tutor in high school.
• I started teaching when my student teaching began.
• I started teaching when I was hired to teach middle school art.

All of these were different jobs, and they required some of the same skills, but the contexts were so different that each one has been its own universe of professional expectations and growth.

Navigating the teaching profession itself is a process, and it takes years to find one's place.

When I started, I was really focused on fitting in with my colleagues.  Do they know and accept me for who I am?

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?

I was caught in that landslide for years.  Perhaps it can be summed up by calling it a crisis of priorities.

I'm happy to be able to look back and say I've gotten past these questions.  The double life thing is exhausting.  I discovered a really comfortable place where I can be myself with my colleagues, my students, their parents, my parents, my friends, everybody.  I discovered that my career is more rewarding than the personal pursuits that were splitting me down the middle.  I still perform and record music, but now it all fits together nicely.

Will this process begin anew if I take another position at another school?  Or is this a rite of passage that teachers need only endure once in their career?

Any way the wind blows...

30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 28

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

Day 28

Respond: Should technology drive curriculum, or vice versa?

I don't think it's like that.  The student should drive both.  What is the reality of technology use in the world that our students are growing up in?  I pay attention to what technology they're using outside the classroom.  My middle schoolers are using their parents' smartphones, their own ipods, xbox, google docs, online gaming, instagram, snapchat, skype...

Next step, teach with those technologies in the classroom.  And teach how to use them responsibly, with health and safety in mind.  The class content vehicle is student-driven.  Relevance is key.  For Media Arts, I'm not going to ask my school to invest in a bunch of cameras when there are cameras on the devices in their lockers not being used.  #BYOD (bring your own device)

Curriculum also looks at the student's world.  Media Arts in general ought to teach kids about voice, mass communication, storytelling, media literacy, collaboration / teamwork, project management, and how to take a good photo.  Now - when I apply this to instagram, for example, I need to consider what the student's needs, desires and definitions of success are for that medium.  The curriculum is shaped to the student's real world experiences.

Technology has been a hot topic in education for a long time, and for obvious reasons.  Computers have ruled the realm of knowledge acquisition and application since their invention, gaining ground in this arena year after year at a dramatic rate.  Ever since the day in 1983 when all those classrooms got Apple IIe computers, technology has been an integral part of education.  Curriculum of course has been around a whole lot longer, but from our students' perspective, there's no priority between the two.

30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 27

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

Day 27
What role do weekends and holidays play in your teaching?

Haha I'm here in my classroom on this Saturday morning!  I guess that says it all.

I was just having this chat with my S.O., also a teacher.  We were going in to work today and talking about how we were going in to work on a Saturday.  We love it.  We love our jobs, and we only love our jobs if we're on top of our responsibilities AND able to pursue our pet projects.  These help us grow as professionals and as people.

As a montessori teacher, her pet project is literally to bring a pet into the classroom.  She already has fish, but she wants something furry and cuddly.  Her students would love that, and they'd learn so much from taking care of a mammal.  Most of her evenings this week were spent researching the possibilities of welcoming a rabbit or a guinea pig into the school community.

Prep time does not afford us the peace of mind, the space for research and experimentation, or the hours to devote to these projects, so we make that time for ourselves.  This is how we learn, this is how we grow.

Saturday!

30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 26

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

Day 26
What are your three favorite go-to sites for help/tips/resources in your teaching?

• Right before I started writing this I was watching a youtube tutorial for the iPad version of iMovie.  I needed to figure out how to add special graphics related to the themes that you can add to your project.  I am endlessly grateful for video tutorials on youtube!

• All through my 3D printing summer camp this year I used TinkerCAD, which kind of blew me away. Web utilities these days are getting REALLY powerful and REALLY easy to use.

• I'm still reeling from this notion that George Lucas sold Star Wars and donated it to education, in part creating Edutopia.  It's particularly personal to me that my lifelong favorite film series was sold to benefit my chosen lifelong career path.  If its origin story were different, Edutopia would still be one of my favorite resources.  I love how linked it is to the education community on Twitter, and how inviting it is for educators to publish on the site.  Today's headline about educating 20th century parents to see the benefit of 21st century education is extremely relevant to my everyday challenges as a teacher

30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 25

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

Day 25
The ideal collaboration between students–what would it look like?

One ideal collaboration in Media Arts happens every year between the 7th grade filmmakers in my class and the poets of 6th grade.

There's a lot going on in this collaboration:

Cross-grade creative partnership!
Adapting a poem into a film = abstract thinking!
Celebrating the amalgamation by screening it at assembly!

These projects make the best middle school films.  Two of the three biggest award winners in class history were adapted from 6th grade poems.

Here's my favorite one:

30 Day Blogging Challenge from Te@chThought: Day 24

In response to the recent challenge from te@chthought, I'm participating in a 30 day blogging mission, starting September 1st!

Day 24
Which learning trend captures your attention the most, and why? (Mobile learning, project-based learning, game-based learning, etc.)

The one that's got me fired up right now is Design Thinking.  The way I see it, it's project-based learning in its purest form.

I'm facilitating Design Thinking in a small team of 5 middle schoolers who signed up to build an Identity Booth.

Ever heard a StoryCorps recording?  These 5 students are going to create something like that!

Right now, my school is in the process of learning about / reflecting on Identity.

The questions students, employees, and families are thinking about this year:

• What is identity?
• How is identity developed?
• How does my understanding of identity development support my role in our school?

As a teacher, I'm merely guiding students into the design thinking process:

What I love about this process is that it's student-driven from the very beginning.

1. Students need to develop a sense of empathy for their creation's ideal end user. 
2. Next, they need to define their focus.
3. Brainstorming!
4. Creating the first prototype.
5. Testing it out - a lot!

The cycle repeats itself again and again until the product has achieved the designers' goals.

More info as this project unfolds!