Gary passed on this challenge a while back “What was the last thing you really learned on purpose? I don’t mean something that you learned in passing. I mean something you went out of your way to find out about. Not because you had to but because you wanted to.” …and I have been thinking about it ever since.
I must admit that I find it difficult to remember the last time that I deliberately learned something that I did not have to learn. I have learned many things in passing because I have several interests – primarily in education, school libraries and technology – for which I have structured my learning environment and my personal learning network. I am constantly reading, viewing, listening and following links that support these interests.
I do remember several learning challenges the most recent of which was creating school websites using Drupal. I had absolutely no reference for the application and no individuals nearby to ask for advice. I did however find the advice, support and direction I needed from the web. My learning process was very similar to that described by Joan Vinall Cox in her post, An Autodidact is Social.
At the moment I am not deeply involved in activities outside of the world of education that spur learning. When I was the president of the Board for Save the Children Canada I was constantly learning about Board management and international development. When I was an ardent traveler I immersed myself in learning about the places in which I planned to travel and as a young runner I immersed myself in fitness lore and technique. Now, however, I am content with armchair traveling and enjoying turning the pages of travel books such as Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux.
I am confident in my capacity as a learner, both from experience and from growing up in a family of learners. I know that when ready to move into another unfamiliar area I will anticipate and be prepared to deal with the messiness, the uncertainty and the thrill of the learning process.
Filed under: Uncategorized — Donna DesRoches @ 6:05 pm
While I should be doing all sorts of things including cleaning my house, and finalizing details for two workshops I am instead reading bloglines and catching up on interesting posts and new resources. And… I came across create across the Hero Factory and generated the incredible Caped Whip Lash…
Filed under: Uncategorized — Donna DesRoches @ 3:41 pm
Via Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk blog comes this video by an articulate young man on the difference between reading for school and the free reading opportunities offered by the library.
Over the past year several schools in our division have participated in a Drupal School Web Site Project. This project started slowly as a way for schools did not have someone with the necessary skills to set up and maintain a web site created in a web-authoring program such as DreamWeaver. Some of the sites in our division had become very dated. School web sites can be difficult to update and very time-consuming to maintain.
Once other schools saw the sites and the ease with which every teacher could add information and maintain their own page they also began requesting a site.
I cannot say that the process has been an easy one for me. Even though I did not have to go through the process of installing Drupal on the Division’s web server I had to learn how to determine which modules we needed and how to configure the application for each school’s site. I learned how to use Drupal by creating, Teaching for Information Literacy, the project for my Masters Program. There were a few late night tears involved in the process! Over time however, I have learned many things and it has become much easier to configure a new site for a school
I know that teachers, including the in-school instructional technology support (iSITS) teachers are very busy therefore I set up the site so that the minute it is released to teachers they can begin to add content.
The schools send me:
Colours, logo, motto, staff lists and menu items
I then ensure that:
Modules are enabled and configured
Users added
Roles and permissions established
Basic look established (Theme, colours, motto, school picture and contact info)
Menu items added
One page of content is created under each user’s login
Once schools started using their site I was soon challenged to learn more – how do I add audio? Upload a video of a tour of my school? Embed a YouTube video? Add a calendar? Some of these things have been a bit challenging to learn and I am extremely grateful for the support that I have had from our technical department. One individual had been assigned to support this project and he so willing to learn and to show and explain things to me that I believe we have made great strides in this service to our schools.
This fall I held a series of regional workshops for the iSITS teachers, school secretaries and other interested staff members. I showed them all the things that I do in the initial configuration and now they have begun to experiment and add the touches that make the website their own.
The most rewarding part of this project has been watching teachers begin to use the site as a communication tool with students and parents. In one school the administrator has asked that all his teachers place their course outlines online. First they begin to add text – homework lists, etc – then they begin to add links, new pages, graphics, photos and YouTube videos.
The Drupal project continues to expand. Our Art Education Consultant has used Drupal to create her Arts Alive Web Site and one of our counselors has created the Youth Network as a way to communicate with the students he sees.
I know that I have a great deal more to learn about Drupal but the positive response from teachers, students, and parents spur me to keep on learning and sharing. Hmmm – maybe it is time to move Learning and Technology from wikispaces to a school division hosted site.
It still amazes me at how emerging technologies can so easily facilitate connection and communication. Yesterday I was browsing my network’s bookmarks in Delicious and came across a bookmark made by Judy O’Connell in Australia to a post by Mike Romard at the Shanghai American School. I really liked the two lessons on web evaluation that he had created for his grade three students and passed the link along to teachers in my school division via Yammer. I immediately received a message back that the link was no longer working. Mike is part of my Twitter network so I sent a DM about the link – he immediately DM’d me and gave me another link which I was able to pass along to the teacher via Yammer. From Shanghai to North Battleford in minutes – wow!
Mike’s lessons “for 3rd grade students on the benefits and pitfalls of the World (Wild) Web” provide teachers with a very engaging way to teach lower elementary students about why they need to think critically about what they find on the web. He uses a variety of video sources that illustrate the points that he wants to make as well as links to his favourite answers to the questions he poses his students. He also includes what he would say to the students for each section of the lesson – very cool – very useful – very creative! Give it a look.
Flying Penguins from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregorrohrig/
Even though I have been a curriculum consultant for two years now I still have the teacher-librarian’s love of connecting teachers and resources. Although I find it a bit more difficult at the division level to really make connections for people I have found that by using a couple of online tools, Delicious and Yammer, I am able to ’spread the word’ about the many wonderful resources that I come across via Twitter, my Delicious network and my Bloglines account.
Delicious is my favourite web 2.0 tool because it not only allows me to collect and organize resources but it also allows me to annotate them. And when I do so I am thinking in the back of mind about the teachers who might be using the resources and how they might find them useful within their teaching context. I can also let individuals within my Delicious network know about a resource that might meet their specific needs. My wish would be that every teacher in our division would bookmark my Delicious link. Yes, yes, it would be much better if they subscribed to or joined my network – but to even occasionally open the bookmark would allow them to quickly and easily find great resources.
Last fall a member of our iSITS committee (in-school instructional technology support) started a Living Sky School DivisionYammer account and several members of the committee have begun to use it share new resources and to ask for and to provide support for each other. (Yammer is much like Twitter but the participants are limited to those with a specific institutional e-mail address) It has become a very useful communication tool and I often will post links to key resources that I think that teachers might find useful.
There are others tools that I know will also be useful in disseminating information about resources to teachers and over the next few weeks I plan to experiment with start pages to create constantly updated lists of resources in as many subject areas as possible. I will keep you posted with regards to the success of my efforts.
Last year I subscribed to and viewed often the 366photo group and wondered if I could possibly manage a photo a day myself. Spurred on by the commitment of those in the group I thought why not start a group and invite friends and colleagues to participate. I did consider joining the larger group – which this year has become very large – but decided I wanted a bit more of personal touch and to at least begin this experience with those that I know.
I have managed five days so far and already I can see that it will be difficult to manage a photo a day – but I am keeping my eyes open and maybe beginning to look at the world in a new way. I hope to that over the course of the year I will become better acquainted with my camera and begin to play with a photo editing program. I am delighted that others have begun to post – some of my friends and colleagues are very talented – but even more important is that this can be another way of building community; of sharing our knowledge, our expertise and even a little of ourselves.
Today was a great way to begin the New Year. I began by listening to Darren Kurpatwa and the convenors of the 2008 K-12 Online Conference and by participating in the backchannel on Chatterous. I found the conversations enthralling as we talked about 21st c. learning, teaching and the hurdles that many impassioned educators are facing.
My most favourite moment of the broadcast was listening to Darren speak about how math is about patterns and how important it is to teach students how to recognize patterns. I have heard Darren speak a few times now and have always been impressed by his enthusiasm and his energy but in this moment in the interview I really heard the passion with which he approaches teaching and especially teaching math
Neil Winton has provided an excellent summary of the interview and the chat.
Following Darren’s interview I logged into Elluminate to participate in a discussion facilitated by Will Richardson on 21st C literacies. Wow! Did the discussion fly! At times it seemed disjointed and it felt like we were going in circles as we struggled with defining literacies and differentiating them from skills. I am in the midst of reading the transcript of the chat and look forward to listening again to the discussion when the audio is posted.
I managed to clean my house and make an occasional post to the chats as I prepared for afternoon coffee and a face-to-face chat with my office mates – who are also curriculum consultants. As great as virtual opportunities are there is nothing like being in the company of good friends and professional colleagues.
Many thanks to Rick Schwier who invited me to participate in the 7 things meme. It spurred me on to writing my first blog post of 2009. Below are the ‘7 things you probably don’t know about me’.
When I was seven our house burned to the ground and my family lost everything. We were squatting on Royal land at Mile 923.3 on the Alaska Highway where my father had built a home. The oil tank that heated our home caught fire 11 days after Christmas and slowly grew into a blaze that destroyed everything. None of my family was harmed and the Whitehorse community looked after us very well. I remember being happy that I did not have to go to school because I did not have uniform
I learned about the power of community and belonging when I played the flute in my high school band. I was not very good but I practiced diligently and managed to become first flautist. We worshiped our band teacher and under his leadership solidified into a strong community that extended beyond the band room. I loved high school and it was primarily because of the community that he created.
I started my teaching career in a ‘alternate’ school in Lethbridge where everyone was called by their first name. Even now, 30 years later, I feel uncomfortable when students call me Ms. DesRoches. Today in the more traditional school setting when I give students the option to call me Donna or Ms. DesRoches they prefer Ms. DesRoches.
I learned the difference between charity and development when I spent eight months as a volunteer in Cochabamba, Bolivia working with street children. I learned that it is very hard even for a knowledgeable volunteer to put aside beliefs and passions and let the people tell you what they need and to simply carry it out. I brought my love of books with me and spent a great deal of money buying books for the children and the school that I worked in. I never once consulted with others about what the real needs might be. The children loved the books but I still wonder if the money could have been better used elsewhere.
I am a strong supporter of Save the Children Canada. I began as a branch volunteer planning fund raising and awareness activities, was elected to the board, and eventually became Chair. During my time on the Board I visited our projects in India and Ethiopia. While in Ethiopia I opened a food relief outlet in the highland community of Ajbar. Even though I am no longer on the board or involved in branch activities Save the Children remains my charity of choice.
I have met both Stephen Lewis and Romeo Dalliare. In my role as the Board Chair of Save the Children Canada I presented our annual award to Stephen Lewis and at the same gala sat at the head table with Romeo Dallaire who was the guest speaker. Wow! A night to remember!
I collect dragons. Early in my career at NBCHS I acquired the nickname ‘dragon-lady’ and as a joke a co-worker presented me with a dragon that remains on my desk today. Since then I have acquired many dragons both European and Asian. I love the symbolism each represents – in the European dragon, the fears that we must slay before we can move forward and in the Asian dragon, wisdom, knowledge and immortality. My most recent dragon is a beautiful jade carving that my sister brought back from China.
for which I have structured my learning environment and my personal learning network. I am constantly reading, viewing, listening and following links that support these interests.
Mike’s lessons “for 3rd grade students on the benefits and pitfalls of the World (Wild) Web” provide teachers with a very engaging way to teach lower elementary students about why they need to think critically about what they find on the web. He uses a variety of video sources that illustrate the points that he wants to make as well as links to his favourite answers to the questions he poses his students. He also includes what he would say to the students for each section of the lesson – very cool – very useful – very creative! Give it a 
Delicious
technology support) started a 
