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
Pro-D Day on the Harrison River - Oct. 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Saturday, December 4, 2010
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!
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!
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