Conundrum: my Teacher Concience is Getting to Me....

The LRC is a very busy place and as is the case in busy places, it is often the little jobs that get pushed by the wayside. Sometimes those little jobs are very important however and should take centre stage.

I am very pleased with much that I have done this school year, but there exists in the back of my head a nagging, niggling little voice that has become very persistent and relentlessness in chiding me about my blog. This becomes especially acute when updating our LRC Facebook Page, LRC Blog and Twitter streams, which are ususally quick and easy to deal with. I do these tasks while ignoring my professional blog.

I need a plan, half of the school year is already water under the bridge and I have only posted a few measly times to a blog I created specifically for reflection and collection! Really, who am I to tell my students they need to reflect on and curate their work, ideas and interests? Excuses  abound and they are all relevant within their contexts.

Honestly, so many things have happened this school year. It has been one of the busiest yet what with staff turn over and new projects and fantastic new gadgets to work with. To be fair, I haven't been totally remiss when it comes to curating and reflecting. It has simply been going on behind the scenes informally, instead of it going where it should, this blog!

During this time I have been dutifully collecting pictures and videos of all of our activities and projects, which I fully intended to share with the world. I just never seem to have the time to do so.

So here it is,  that pivotal moment. In fact the moment of truth has arrived.  I am making a pledge (publicly) to myself, not to deal with the overwhelming collection of ideas and activities I planned on sharing, but to slow down, choose just one and share it well.

This will be one of what I am sure will be many New Years resolutions I suppose, and will likely share a shelf (for a short time) with others. That shelf already contains things like cleaning the equipment closets and drawers, updating the iPads and once and for all figuring out what the overabundance of keys in that certain drawer are actually for!!!  January may be soon enough, who knows it could even happen before. 

The message I want to get out to all the busy teachers everywhere is, don't despair if you find yourselves in a similar situation. Life is a matter of balance and we all know when an imbalance exists. I think recognising it, no matter how long it takes and remedying that imbalance if and when possible is a feat worth performing.

Just remember to be kind and patient to yourselves and tell your consciences, so guilty of all those incomplete tasks, to back off, reassess and get on with things even if it means dumping a few by the wayside while following a different plan of action.

Happy end of 2014.
All my best for a prosperous, productive and positive 2015.
(Don't you just love alliteration!!!)

Flipping the Learning-Creating Videos in WoW

Our club met up again yesterday, but a lot has happened in the course of this last week. The students have been working at their quests every chance they get and some are now at level 20! I won't mention what level I am at.  They have learned how to get around, fly on griffins, take trains and boats, and use tunnels. They are way ahead of me now. Does that worry me? Not a bit, it is exactly what I hoped would happen. My students are furious and relentless about their WoW work.

So far we have only begun to use the blog. The skill is new to most of them and I want to make sure they are comfortable with it before introducing the readings and reflections. Soon after our first lesson, I realised that my carefully planned unit would need a major revamp. They were way past much of what I had planned for them. If only they were that way about all their school work....I am pleased to mention that the directed teaching has been minimal and I haven't spent hours putting online tutorials together either. They have been directing their own learning with very little support and sharing new skills with the group.

It is for this reason I thought it only fit to have them share some of their discoveries with us by recording using the WoW Mac Options. We could have gone further, narrated the vids, rendered them after careful editing in iMovie, or done screencasts with Quicktime or Screencast-o-matic, but all except one (which was done as 4 separate vids) are unedited footage. The learning has flipped with no upset to those involved. My students are now my WoW teachers and I retain my position as facilitator, the setter of assignments, readings etc...How I envy the speed with which they learn....again if only they could do that, or feel motivated to do so in all their regular lessons.

Did I mention a 12th grader asked to come on board (a level 84 12th grader!!!)? We now have an expert in the midst, which brings me back to my earlier statement, something about students as teachers. The roles have certainly flipped, leaving me free to learn alongside them, to learn from them and facilitate the journey ahead.

Teaching Reading through Gaming and Teamwork

For several years now, I  have been hearing stories about how educators  use World of Warcraft for teaching and learning. Recently I decided it was time to take the plunge and give it a try. I was fortunate enough to attend ISTE 2010 where I made a Twitter connection that would prove very inspirational.


The Inspiration for my initial work with WoW came from the fantastic work done by WoW in Schools. If you have ever wanted to know more about how teachers are using WoW to teach students important 21st century skills, this is the place to go.

Anyhow, I need a plan that accounted for several things, the purpose or rationale for using WoW with our students (below), the skills I wanted to teach, the resources we would use, and of course the role of parents in all of this.

The purpose of the unit I came up with is to engage students in reading activities which that draw parallels between online gaming activities and involve an element of teamwork in a virtual world. Through quests, students interact with other players, reflect on their experiences in written form as well as through discussion drawing parallels between their quests and other experiences in-world and their readings. Each of the 10 lessons will include a blog post which will reflect on different aspects of the readings and student gaming experiences.

In planning the unit, I decided to focus on one of our school's Traits and Values, TEAMWORK. It seemed to me that a MMOG was a great way to focus on it. I chose a graphic novel to be the basis of our reading work, The Arctic Incident. Adapted by Eoin Colfer Andrew Donkin (Artemis Fowl Graphic Novel), and downloaded the trial version of WoW. I ordered 10 copies of the graphic novel, wrote a carefully worded letter for our parents, which explains the learning intentions, created a brief quest example video, and approached my school Admin team with a proposal to discuss. At the same time I began preparing lessons, each of which focuses on the following areas: A reading, A game challenge or activity,a discussion and a blog post, My next step was to create a response blog.

In about 2 weeks time I will be in a position to run an information session for the kids, send the letters home to parents and see what responses I can collect.

I haven't been this excited about a new project in a while, or at least a month or two anyway.

Wish me luck!

The New LRC Blog

There are many ways to find out what is going on at the LRC. You can "like" us in Facebook, Follow us on Twitter, view the website, and view LRC Videos and photos on YouTube and Flickr.
This school year the LRC has launched this new blog which will bring all of these networks together in one place, as well as provide a venue for short informative updates, as well as the LRC Newsletter to be uploaded each month for your viewing pleasure.
It is our sincerest hope that you will enjoy our new blog, use it to keep up on the latest in regards to the LRC and feel free to communicate with us through it and our other social networks linked to within.
Here's to the start of a new exciting school year full of innovation in learning.

Post to Blog

It's been a while. There has been so much going on with the start of the new school year, much of it would make for interesting posts, but it has all been so time consuming (and I mean that in a good way), that posting has not been an option. This of course generated an ongoing feeling of guilt. I am very pleased that  I have found one small way of alleviating some of this guilt. It kind of dropped into my inbox this morning, as I was perusing my Diigo Group updates. One of the blog posts I encountered had been auto-posted directly from Diigo. I spend a great deal of time going through links and posting to various Diigo groups, so when I saw this I had to wonder, why I didn't know about this option.

Well I know about it now and have added it to some of my Diigo groups. At great risk to over posting (can you say that?)  in my blog  many of the gems that I come across each day will now appear here.

The Latest Shift Happens

Have you seen the latest shift happens? If these figures are accurate, the amount of activity both social and financial happening by way of social networks is astounding.

 It is certainly updated and worth watching.
Check it out at our new ABCICT Blog!

Moving On

Image via WikipediaI have finally made the decision to move on.  I  am very thankful to Edublogs for having provided a home for my blog during these past 3 years, but mine remains a free account. As the options have been repeatedly reduced  from free accounts over the last year, so too has my patience with the situation waned. As our school  is a Google Apps institution, it makes better sense for me to move forward with Blogger, which will soon become a part of our Apps Accounts. It also links in nicely with other Google Apps that we use with our blogs at school. In fact I am now officially climbing down, not without pain, from my Edublogs soapbox. I will now be promoting Blogger at school for all new blogs.
Those who already oversee one of our many school Edublogs accounts may also find themselves switching over, unless their departments are on board with shelling out the cash to keep their Edublogs in top form.
If anybody knows of a way to migrate (as some might say backwards) from Edublogs to Blogger, I would really appreciate a brief explanation, or link to a tutorial.
If interested, this is the link to my new blog.