Well after a few months of planning and discussions the Flat Planet Project is under way. A few months ago I contacted fellow religious education teacher and edublogger Neil and asked if he would be interested in joining my class in an online collaborative project. He jumped enthusiastically on board with the idea and has done a great deal of work to get this project going. (Thanks Neil). I must say even though I searched him out to engage in this process I was a bit worried about how my students would responsd to the idea.  Would they be willing to work with a class in a different country, who were 2 years younger than them (this is a big deal when you’re 17/18)?  But I must say that since the project was introduced the students have been very keen, enthusiastic, and engaged in the whole process.  Today I was talking about the project with some of my students and I told them about some of the places that the wiki and the blog have had hits from and they said they felt a lot of pressure to do well on it because of the global audience, and the judges who will be participating.  They also said that this was motivating them to do well.  Furthermore, they said it was “exciting”!  Ah, now that’s music to my ears!

Flat Planet Project

Well it has been a while since my last post. I have been busy implementing the use of some Web 2.0 tools into my classroom and have been hitting a few bumps along the way. Mainly students having issues with getting their blogs setup. However, many of my students have been blogging and we are using a wiki for some collaborative work so I am happy with the overall progress to date. I have also been busy arranging an online collaborative project with a teacher in London which I hope to write more about later. And along with all the other things that keep us teachers busy, it is time for progress reports. My mother was going through some old papers she found in a box in her basement and she found what may very well be my first progress report. I have attached it below.

education
assessment
web 2.0
Turbo Tagger

Well today was the end of the first week of the second semester and I have taken the leap into making my classroom a technologically integrated classroom. And I do this in a classroom with no technology, well, except for a TV (that isn’t connected to anything: cable,dvd-player, vcr) and an overhead projector. I have asked my students in my three classes to sign up for blog accounts. I started with my Grade 11 class and by the end of today about a third of the class had created blogs that I could access and the rest were in the process of creating their blog and some were having a little difficulty, however, I think this is not because of anything they are doing but because of some minor issues they are ironing out at learnerblogs. I asked my two Grade 12 classes today to sign up for blogs over the weekend, so Monday will bring some more links to add to the Blogroll.

I must admit, I was somewhat hesitant, and, somewhat nervous in taking this leap. I am heading into uncharted waters. I wonder how is this going to change my comfort zone? How is this going to change what I have been doing in the classroom since I started teaching in 2000? Am I going to have to change everything? Is this going to be more work for me on top of the already heavy workload? But along with these fears there is also excitement. Like the kind of thing you feel as you approach the top of a roller coaster before the big drop and the rush. At any rate I think this is one teacher’s step in making Chris Walsh’s wish come true.

My class blog can be found here and you can find the links to my student blogs there.

Stay tuned, coming soon the class wiki.

web2.0
student blogging
education technology
Turbo Tagger

This video has appeared on a couple of blogs that I read and had to post it here too. The times they are a changing have changed. Today I asked my first class of students to go home and start a blog. Let the Web 2.0 adventure begin. Thanks to Chris Betcher and Vicki Davis for pointing this one out.

web2
Turbo Tagger

I just saw a story on the CBC about how educators (Loyalist College) are using a virtual world called Second Life to grant credit to students. Students participate in this virtual classroom engaging in converstation with other students and their teachers by raising their avatar’s hand. Imagine that. The teacher could be in one part of the world with students “attending” the class from anywhere in the world where they have access to a computer and an internet connection. It made me stop and think about the situation many of my high school teacher colleagues and I find ourselves in, and that is the same type of learning that we were engaged in twenty years ago. I can remeber using a computer in my Gr. 5 class in 1982. I typed in a friend’s name and with the help of the teacher I centered it on the screen and then copied it into the four corners of the screen. (I wonder why I can remember that over any other of my school days experiences.) Other than that I remember overheads, blackboards, and textbooks. The only thing different in the classroom that I teach in is that there is a TV mounted to the ceiling. The school is wireless and a few students are stariting to bring in their own laptops. I think/hope this trend will continue where it gets to the point that the students (and their parents) will demand access to technology in the classroom which will lead to it being more fully integrated. Until then we will continue to take babysteps.

flatworld
education technology
virtual learning
Turbo Tagger

Over the past year I have spent a great deal of time thinking about technology integration in the classroom. Around this time last year I enrolled in Computers in the Classroom Part One. It is the first part of a three part specialist course on the integration of computer technology in the classroom offered through most faculties of education in Ontario. I enrolled in the online course offered by the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. At around the same time a teacher from my school arranged an exchange with a teacher from Australia. I remember the day he arrived. Somebody said, “the guy from Australia is here.” I looked out of the window in my office which overlooks the gymnasium and I saw him walking across the gym floor. It turned out that he would be setting up in my workroom as one of the teachers in the room only teaches first semester. How fortunate I was. You see this teacher is a technophile of the highest calibre. And he arrived at just the right time. He introduced me to various things that teachers can do with technology (wikis, podcasting, blogging-in fact it is partly because of him that I started and am maintaining this blog) and was of much help when it came time for me to complete an assignment. People who know a lot about technology, I imagine, are often being pestered by those of us who know comparatively little. If I were in their shoes I know I would probably get tired of the constant questions being bombarded at me. This was not the case with him. In fact he always seemed eager to help or to introduce you to something new. I can’t count how many times he would come in in the morning with Macbook in hand and say to me “Have you seen this?” And there would be some new discovery for me to think about. I completed the third part of Computers in the Classroom last week, and now have the designation of Specialist to add to my credentials. I owe a lot of my success in the course to this man from Down Under. So I am making this post a dedication to my Techno-Guru, Chris Betcher. Cheers Mate I am going to miss you.

technology integration
Chris Betcher
Turbo Tagger

I have been tagged by my friend and colleague Chris with this ‘5 things about me’ meme. I am supposed to write about 5 little known things about me and then I am supposed to tag 5 others. This is supposed to spread amongst educational bloggers and encourage them to use tags on their posts, something which I haven’t really been doing since one of my first posts. As David Warlick said in his keynote address at the K12 Online Conference this past fall that tags encourage the conversations that are so important to learning. So here we go.

1. I almost died before I was born.

I was born in Northern Ireland, or the North of Ireland as a good Catholic Republican should say, in 1972. The current round of violence in Ireland, known as “the Troubles“, kicked off in 1969 and more or less ended (with a few incidents along the way) in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. During this time aprroximately 3500 people were killed. In 1972, the year I was born, saw the most deaths of any year of the Troubles. 479 people were killed that year. To put this into perspective, 1976 was the second worst year with 295 killed. Many of the deaths were attributed to sectarian violence. One way to tell a person’s religion was to watch what direction they were walking. People could tell your religion because you were etiher walking in the direction of a Catholic/Nationalist/Republican neighbourhood or you were walking in the direction of a Protestant/Loyalist neighbourhood. When my mom was pregnant with me and walking towards my grandmother’s home a car pulled up, the window was lowered, and a spray of automatic gunfire emerged from the car. My grandmother, who was with my mom at the time, grabbed my mom and shoved her into the doorway of a shop. My grandmother came in behind her and then a young woman came in behind my grandmother. There was a young man behind the woman. He was shot in the neck and died. Thankfully my mother wasn’t number 480 in 1972.

2. From auto mechanic to religious education teacher???

I didn’t always want to be a teacher. In fact the very thought would have made me laugh when I was a student. The idea would have probably made some of my teachers laugh as well. In Ontario when I was in high school you had to complete a fifth year of high school (Gr. 13 or OACs-Ontario Academic Credits) if you wanted to go to university. I graduated in my fourth year and went on to college to take a course to train in the fundamentals of auto mechanics and to study the business aspect of running an auto mechanics business. While taking this course I used public transit. I had about a one hour commute each way everyday. So I used this time to read. I was devouring books on Irish history. I also had to take some breadth courses as a part of the program I was in and these opened me up to some other areas of interest. I came to the realisation that I no longer wanted to be a mechanic. This led to me enrolling in a General Arts and Science course at another community college to figure out what exactly I wanted to do. As I think about this I remember when I was in Grade 5 one of the school districts superintendants came to my class and was walking around looking at our notebooks and asking us questions. I forget what we were working on but he asked me if that was my favourite subject. I said no, religion was. I think this made a superintendant of a Catholic school board very happy. His next question was did I want to become a priest! I always had an interest in things religious/supernatural so I went on to get my degree in religious studies and here I am!

3. I have a Blog.

I suppose the fact that I am a blogger now is not known by very many, and the purpose of this post is to get me to publicise my blog by using tags. I have been reading a lot of blogs lately related to education and to Catholicism. I’ve been learning a lot from reading these blogs and I have been drawn into the converstaion that is going on in these two areas. I am looking forward to incorporating blogs and other Web 2.0 tools into my religious education classroom. Now all I need is a little more access to technology and things would be grand.

4. I am a Past President of the York University Irish Students Asscociation

When I was a student at York University in Toronto I was looking for some way to get involved in campus life. York University is the third largest university in Canada and though this may seem like the perfect place to get to know a lot of people, Ifound it was the opposite. York was also known as Commuter U. This was due to the fact that a great number of the students attending commuted into the university adn then went home at the end of the day. This was the case for me. So although there were upwards of thrity to forty thousand people on campus at any given time, most people went to their classes and then went home without taking the time to even get to know people in their classes. So one of my first days on campus I went to the student centre and found the Irish Students’ Association(ISA) and joined. I got to know some great people there. In fact the only people I am in contact with from my university days are people I met through the ISA. One of them got married to my wife’s best friend! During my second year I took on the role of ISA president and organised pub crawls, a film night in the campus theatre, and our participation in the Toronto St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

5. I love to experiment in the Kitchen

If I ever leave teaching I think I would like to be a chef. I love to cook and play around with different spices and ingredients in the kitchen. I have had this interest for cooking since I was about 12 or 13. One of my specialties is a multi-layered dip that includes spinach, avacado, and several cheeses-and there are no calories in it!

So there you are, 5 things about me that you may not know. Now I will tag:

Tim Lauer
Mark Wagner
Intellectual Bohemian
Anne Davis
Fred the Fish
meme
Turbo Tagger

On behalf of my family and friends I would like to thank you for being named Time’s Person of the Year for 2006.

My wife and I were driving around town last Friday and we drove past one of the high schools that is in the district that I teach for (I teach at a high school in another town, but same school board) and she read on their sign out front “PD (Professional Development) day next Friday.” I thought she was mistaken. We had just had one a couple of weeks ago. I thought to myself, “they haven’t taken down the sign for the last PD day yet?!?!” Furthermore, I could picture in my head the tracking sheets we use to monitor student attendance which highlights days that are holidays or PD days and I knew that Friday, November 3 was not highlighted. I confirmed this on Monday morning when I went into school. However, I looked at the school calendar that I have posted on my bulletin board and there it was, the symbol indicating that Friday, November 3 is indeed a board wide (elementary and secondary) PD day!

So what area of professional development is going to be addressed? Your guess is as good as mine. Why not give teachers choice in PD? Shouldn’t we as teachers be given the option to choose an area for growth professionally that interests us? It is funny that this happened around the same time that the K12 Online Conference is going on. I have been on the K12 Online Conference site every night for the past week. This conference is an excellent example of self-directed PD. In his keynote address David Warlick opened by stating “I am here and I am now, and you are there and you are then.” What he was talking about was the fact that unlike traditional conferences this one allows the participants to access the PD they want, when they want, where they want. You don’t have to scramble into town through rush hour to get to the conference on time. You can “attend” the conference in your pajamas if you want (David noted that the way he was dressed when giving his keynote was not the way he would dress for a traditional conference). You can “tell” the speaker to stop for a moment while you get a coffee or take a call. Another benefit is that you can go back and listen or watch the presentations over and over if you like. It is the freedom and self-direction as much as the content that I have really liked about this conference. This conference’s focus is the use of technology in education, but what I wonder is how long will it be before there are online conferences for the various subject areas. The potential is incredible. It would be hard to imagine that you couldn’t book a speaker (I am here and I am now etc). A colleague who has also been “attending” this conference asked me today if we could watch some more podcasts from K12Online for our PD day on Friday. Wouldn’t that be nice?!

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David Warlick’s Blog
K 12 Online Conference