EcoKids Success and Merry Christmas!

My incredibly busy (and productive) fall school term is over, and now I get to breathe again! The video that my class made about the salmon spawning near our school is finally on the EcoKids website - www.ecokids.ca/pub/ecoreporters/videos/save_the_salmon.cfm. We are pretty excited about finishing the first stage of our multi-media documentation of our learning at school. We will be producing two more videos or photo-stories in the next two terms for EcoKids.
We celebrated the end of the term by participating in a very cool concert called "I Need a Winter Vacation" with the other 350 or so students at Eagle Ridge School. The kids sang beautifully and several soloists got over their stage fright and performed as Shakespearean actors on the stage - Romeo and Juliet meet Julius Caesar.
And of course, my 2-year LTT program is finished - went out with a bang (more like a fizzle, since my video/PowerPoint comprehensive portfolio presentation in our last class wouldn't play properly on the computer I was using!) But I certainly learned a lot and made huge strides in my teaching practice towards a student-centered constructivist classroom.
Helping to extricate our 31 year-old son from a tough situation in Hanoi, Vietnam, made the last week of school even more exciting! Arranging a flight with a travel agent in Vietnam with a 15-hour time difference and a malfunctioning credit card was not easy, but imagine trying to do that without email and the ability to pay bills half-way around the globe in a wink!
Now I just have two rooms in our house to clean from top to bottom, paper and teaching stuff that have accumulated in the past year or so of neglect. I hope I can get that done before Christmas and then relax before going back to school - snowshoeing, maybe some telemark skiing, more time with friends than I usually have to spend. Oh yes, and of course, all the Christmas goodies to enjoy that my students and their parents blessed me with as gifts. I guess I'll need that snowshoeing!
A peaceful and joyous Christmas to all and all the best in 2011. (Boy, the years are going by way too quickly!) If you aren't one of the 23 million people who have viewed this heart-warming video already, please take 5 minutes and see it, it really says Christmas to me! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE

4 Days to Go!! (in LTT, that is)

Hi there all my friends in the blogosphere! I hope your chosen profession is chugging away as successfully as mine is right now. I have completed two of the three major projects I was working on in the last few weeks: 1) report cards are done and out to my students' parents and 2) I have finished editing our salmon spawning video for EcoKids down to 2 minutes; it looks pretty cool, everybody I've shown it to at school loves it! Now I have to solve a wee technical hurdle, that is getting it burned onto a DVD to send to Toronto so they can put it on the EcoKids website. Two tries at burning successfully and counting!

One of my students posted something very cool to our Edmodo network last week. He posted a link to a TED-talk video showing an 11 year-old boy talking about all the problems with our industrial food production and distribution system - factory farms, polluted farmland, etc. This is a great example of how I had hoped my Grade 4 students (only 8 or 9 years old) would interact with our network - by posting resources their classmates could learn from. Several of his classmates have viewed the 5 minute video and responded to it. Here is the link: TED Talk about the food system

Another student showed us a website she was using to research the salmon for our video. On it, she found the etymology of the word "salmon"; it comes from a Latin word "salmo" which means "leaper". Makes sense, eh? I encouraged the rest of the class to post other things they found interesting. Just this morning, a girl posted the link to another EcoKids video from a class that won the 2010 EcoKids Challenge by producing a video about their recycling program. Well done! Here is that link: 2010 Great EcoKids Challenge Champion video.

So I've got lots of evidence I can use for my comprehensive portfolio for my last LTT presentation next Wednesday, 4 days from now. Got to go work on it - bye!

Update on lots of stuff

Hello there. I haven't blogged for a while, so I have lots to update you on.

First, there's our EcoReporters project of filming the salmon spawning in Scott Creek near our school. My class and I have taken the last three Wednesday afternoons to head down to the creek. Amazingly warm and sunny weather all 3 days, with enough rain in between to keep the water level high enough to allow the fish to swim up the creek. The students, in groups of 4 or 5, have spent time in class writing their own scripts about the salmon and filming each other by the creek with the fish running. We discovered that weirs had been built across the creek in 2 or 3 places to make deep water pools for the fish to rest in, which necessitated building fish ladders in the weirs. There hasn't been a huge number of live fish any of those days, but usually 2 or 3 valiantly struggling up the creek. Lots of dead fish, though, which has fascinated the kids, especially the boys, as much or more than the live ones! The dead fish smell last week was pretty strong! It's hard to keep the kids out of the water; they want to get to know the fish intimately, dead or alive! Trying to keep 22 kids quiet while one group is filming is not easy. After our first practice filming, I showed the videos to the class and we spent some time evaluating the pros and cons of each one. They realized that all the background noise made it hard to hear the kids who were speaking on camera. They're learning a lot about how to write a short (2-minute) script summarizing all the information they have researched about the fish and read their scripts in front of a camera. Not easy when you've never done it before! That's an aspect of language arts that's pretty new to them. After 2 hours of filming over the past 2 weeks, I hope we have enough footage to edit together to make our final presentation. When we do, I'll post some of it here for folks to see.

Our Edmodo social learning network is humming right along. The students are using it to help each other with assignments and to understand aspects of the technology we are using in all our projects.

The third project incorporating digital technologies is my last field study for LTT. It involves the students, in pairs, planning virtual trips to another country in the world with Googlemaps, and collaborating in the creation of the maps, i.e. asking each other questions and sharing ideas and tips via Edmodo. We have spent 5 or 6 weeks studying maps of the world - the continents, oceans, hemispheres, and the location of many countries. Just at the end of October, we were ready to start using Googlemaps to trace routes around the globe. I had 2 big questions: How could we trace routes across the oceans when Googlemaps would only give directions within one continental land-mass?; and  how could we get the students saving their maps on the site without them using email addresses, which our school district doesn’t like using for elementary students. The answers to both questions came through trial and error. I discovered that when you save a map in “My Maps”, you can then edit it and draw lines anywhere on the map, across oceans or landmasses, and you can force the line to follow roads on land. Through a bit of searching on the Googlemaps users forum and more trial and error, I found that more than one person at a time can log into the same account to save and edit different maps. I set up a new account using my SD43 email address, gave it a generic password, and shared that with my students one Monday morning in the lab. 10 minutes later, we had 27 different computers all on the account, creating and saving maps to it.  The response time is pretty slow with that many simultaneous users, but it works. Usually, we won’t all be on together; they will be working on our 3 classroom computers or at home. Already (Nov. 10) we have kids sharing ideas and questions about their maps on Edmodo. I have only a few weeks to finish that project, or at least get some data to report in my field study and prepare my comprehensive portfolio for our LTT course. So I'll go out with a bang as usual!

Oh yes, and there's 26 report cards to write in the next 2 weeks. Child's play!! If only I was a child!

Talk to you soon - send me some coffee!