Last week, tragedy struck in Humboldt Saskatchewan when a semi truck t-boned a bus filled with junior hockey players. The internet has been filled with emotion since this horrible incident.
The Humboldt Broncos participated in the “Mannequin Challenge” a year and a half ago.
And this is the beauty in the fact that our kids are recording their lives with their personal devices.
It’s a silly Internet game, a challenge that was a viral sensation in 2016. It was silly. It was pointless. These boys recorded their challenge (click to view). Aren’t we all so glad they did?
All the selfies those 15 guys took? Those shots are gold to their families today. We often criticize kids for being too absorbed in their device, or for taking pictures of everything.
But the number of kids I know in the past few years who have lost their friends, their classmates, their peers, compels me to wonder if maybe we shouldn’t all record our lives with such glee and such newness. Because when we are gone that data means something to someone.
Real life has an interesting way of presenting opportunities that can be embedded into instruction.
This fall, I’ve done a wholesale change to my grade eight technology program. I’ve launched a course with design learning at the heart of the project. The upfront costs were significant, but not impossible for a junior high school if we proceed strategically. To date I’ve invested in a Cameo cutter (and much vinyl for the cutter), a 3-D printer, some raspberry Pi kits, a Makey Makey, Bloxels, and Ozobots coding robots.
The Cameo cutter has allowed us to begin to advertise our skills, and attempt to take some measures to recoup the cost of the consumables necessary to run an effective design program. To that end, we’ve created a Facebook page called 110 Design (My classroom is room 110, so should someone else take over the program, the advertising is easy to continue forward).
In the past month, our town has launched a new system for collecting garbage, and it involves standardized “black garbage bins” that all citizens must use. There has been a huge backlash from the residents in this town, and we struggled to make sense of the negativity. As we inspected the conversations on the local Facebook groups; it occurred to us that perhaps the underlying concern was in the potential to lose one’s garbage bin should a wind kick up. It’s a fact that our area of the province can be quite windy at times; particularly in the spring.
To take a small litmus test as to whether we were on the right track with this thought, I posted an offer on the local Facebook groups to provide small, standardized vinyl labels to be affixed to the top of the bins, for the cost of $5.00, providing the address of the residence the bin belongs to. The response was overwhelmingly positive; and requests started to flood in.
The first challenge to students was to find a means of tracking the orders. Students were presented with the challenge via Google classroom and were given the opportunity to work alone, in pairs or with a group of three.
We settled on using Google Forms, as we are a GSuite school and there is no cost to us (or to our profit margin) to utilize it to collect the information. Next we sent an email to our Mayor asking if we could present our idea to Town Council at their first available opportunity. Within an hour of sending the email, we received this response:
It reads:
Good morning Michelle. Thanks very much for your email concerning your school’s idea to help with labelling the black carts! It sounds very promising, and I’ve forwarded your request to come before council, to our Director of Legislative Services. Someone should be getting in contact with you soon. It seems like a very solid idea, and could help a great deal with people being able to recognize their own carts. Please pass along my compliments to your student group for their citizenship and forward thinking! Thanks again, Pat.
Students are so proud to be part of the solution to a local issue, and are incredibly eager to have the opportunity to present our plans to town council, and then we will begin the process of creating and delivering. They will certainly have a challenge in monitoring which addresses are complete, and planning how we are going to collect the $5 per label from the citizens without putting pressure onto our school’s secretaries. With only having mentioned it once on the local Facebook page and once on our school’s Facebook page, we already have over 100 orders for these bin labels.
The process of gamifying French as a Second Language has taken a large chunk of time to plan, prepare and execute; hence the time away from my blog posting. I have been extremely pleased with the results to date. Student engagement is at an all-time high for a second language class, and students report genuinely looking forward to this class. Interesting points and comments so far include:
“My son is really enjoying French this year. Like really enjoying it. And if I’m being honest, I was very very worried about him having that class this year.”
“Mrs. Baragar, this is my very favourite class, and it’s not even close! I love French!!”
This was the purpose and was certainly my intention when I made the choice to go this route with this new (although very old, French is my undergrad major) teaching assignment. In fact, it is going so well that I’ve already been asked if I would entertain teaching a grade nine level course – an offering we’ve not had in my school for many years.
Inventing games for the grade seven level can be quite challenging; they are at an absolutely beginner level with the language, so developing some basic knowledge was almost critical in order to be able to play many mini games. A successful game has been the ping pong balls. I have a bucket filled with ping pong balls, each with a point value written on the ball. I pose review questions at the start of class, and a correct answer (or genuine effort – pronunciation is not a big issue at this stage of learning) the student receives a ball. When everyone has a ball – or two, or three, they add up their total points and submit it to me on a “points tally” slip.
Points translate to cards, and cards enable the student to thwart the actions of others in a larger game scenario (eg: Jeopardy).
Challenges to this model of teaching and learning seem to be specific to the school’s timetable. The way we function right now, option classes run for a full year, and I only have each class two time per week; though occasionally I have them on a Friday. From time to time, depending on the timing of assemblies and other school activities a week can pass between classes. This makes it somewhat difficult to hold an expectation on retention of learning, and certainly prohibits my teaching French IN FRENCH.
ABOVE: Students (Hockey Program Boys) stay into lunch voluntarily to complete a French quiz to achieve full points!
I had the opportunity today to present to teachers in my school division regarding students bringing cell phones to class, and how teachers can begin to engage students using these devices.
I loaded my powerpoint into Zeetings and embedded one audience poll question to illustrate how easy it was for me to “push” my presentation into student devices, and to then formatively assess the audience opinions/understanding/feedback with this utility. We talked about a few other apps, management and student distraction, and did a bit of thinking outside the box.
My presentation, for those who attended (or those who did not) can be found here.
The game designs and plans are coming along nicely. I’ve got the website started; URL will be revealed soon.
I’m drooling over the Fantasy mapping software as I work to create the map of the island the game will be set on. The Pro Fantasy Software product “Campaign Cartographer 3” looks excellent. I just want to be certain that $44.95 (USD) is worth it. I don’t want to spend days and days learning a new piece of software just to create a map; but I also recognize that the map is a key component in writing the narrative, and in making the game itself make sense to me, and, perhaps more importantly, to my students.
The beta map creator at Inkarnate is fun to play around with, but I feel like my maps look a little bit infantile once created. However, it’s free and it’s quick!
Perhaps I’ll see if someone on Fiverr wants to create me a map and I’ll save myself the challenge of becoming a cartographer!
Edited to add that in the end I used fiverr to create the map.
I am amassing a few resources now for my gamified French 7 & 8 classes. Amazon Prime Day was a big help for that. I even got an awesome set of skeleton keys (you can’t open a lock without finding the key first!) to build into the game.
Here is a sampling of the first Power Cards.
They will be embellished with different sheens and colours to differentiate the very rare ones from the more common ones. I have a few things to figure out yet with the card generator that I’m using.
The kids do not speak French. At all. The language on these is WAY above their capability. But that’s part of my differentiation plan. Those who put more into learning the game will acquire a broader and more robust vocabulary in so doing.
The cards will come into play in class, as part of a bigger game. I’m working on the Narrative right now.
I have attack cards in the works as well that they can use during tests, quizzes etc. to look up an answer to skip a question etc. But those cards will be earned during class time. There’s an element of chance to it all, but there’s also going to be skill built into the games.
Some preliminary ideas for learning games and formative assessment:
I’ll use the drones from my tech classes to conjugate verbs outside using a grid and sidewalk chalk. That way the kids who are better with motor skills, but weaker academically play a valuable part.
We’ll do Jeopardy but they can use the cards for extra time, to cause another player to miss a turn, to double point value etc.
We’ll do pictionary-type4 activities, we will use our devices with apps like Kahoot and Socrative for fast-paced answers.
I have a million ideas. I’m glad I knew about this new teaching assignment before the summer so I’d have a chance to put into play a bunch of the research I did with my M.Ed. I want this to be minimal paper and maximum learning. I’m using the work of Yukai-Chou and his Octalysis model as the backbone, and conferring (via Twitter!) with Scott Hebert who built a grade 8 science class in a gamified structure. His knowledge of resources and gamification has been invaluable.
I’ve secured my web address at which to start building the mini games and battles, and to house the videos.
Using the Hearthstone Card Generator, I am creating the initial character cards for students. These cards are based on French Canadian History, and the game will facilitate advancements and gains to mimic the cultural change of the past 150 years.
Les habitants will be the base level of player. All students will begin in the class “Les habitants.
I have been assigned four classes of introductory French Second Language next year. My undergraduate major was French Second Language and my minor was French Immersion. I am choosing to take on the challenge of gamifying these two courses; this will be an instructional design challenge unlike any I’ve attempted before, and I am super excited about this. I will be following the lead of Master Heebs from Scientia Terra in my creation; what he has done in his grade eight science class is outstanding and I am looking forward to the challenge. I too will be following the Octalysis gamification framework developed by Yukai Chou to create these two courses.
I’m starting at the narrative level to create the story and the mission, to give meaning to the work that students will do throughout the year. I’ll use a series of cards to bring French Canadian history and culture into the coursework in a simple, fun, memorable way. We’ll add in some magic, some skills, some luck and some student control and we will MAKE FRENCH LANGUAGE LEARNING FUN AND SUCCESSFUL.
I am going to do a series of blog posts called “iPad tabs”. I spend time in the evenings engaging with my online Professional Learning Networks (PLNs), and inevitably I wind up with multiple tabs open on my iPad that intrigue me for both professional and personal reasons. I am going to post my tabs here for my own reference, and for my blog readers as well!!
I have only one course left for my M.Ed, which has been the focus of this website so far; all my M.Ed work is posted here. However, the volume of time that has been consumed in completing this degree has left the blogging portion somewhat unattended; vacant even! I will have a year off between the M.Ed and the EdD (I will be submitting my application next winter to commence in July 2018), and that year will be devoted to blogging about education, pedagogy, technology, design-based learning, makerspaces, game-based learning, gamification and twenty-first century learning!! I am looking forward to exploring some of the details, tools and possibilities!!!
I’ve run into a javascript error when trying to export my video from Go Animate directly into my YouTube channel, and am waiting for it to export the video as a .mp4 file that I can “paste” together with the remaining 4 minutes that need to be added. While it’s exporting, I thought I’d use take the opportunity to test the native player that Go Animate offers. So, here is part 1 of my video.
For years, I thought that Twitter was just for narcissists. I thought that all you found on Twitter were things like “I’m going for a pizza” and “selfies” – you know…. those photos that teens and young adults take of themselves with their arm outstretched, camera-phone pointed at their own face….
I was wrong. The following is just a “scratch the surface” conceptual introduction to the concept of Twitter and hashtagging.
With a limit of 145 characters on Twitter, you get a pretty succinct idea regarding your level of interest in a given article posted there. There is no superfluous language or embellishment. It cuts straight to the point. The spartan limitation is refreshing in a society that has a tendency to go on and on and on about things. Not on Twitter. You can’t ramble on Twitter.
Twitter is an incredibly powerful news feed, social feed and professional growth feed. And the driving force behind it all is the system of “hashtags”. You’ve seen hashtags around the net…. they’re those words or phrases preceded by the #. I’m not going to tackle all the geek-speak around hashtags; let’s just cut to the chase of what do they do. THEY MAKE TWITTER SEARCHABLE. Sometimes the hashtag is a tongue-in-cheek- remark about what was posted – take for example #firstworldproblems – but go ahead and put that hastag into a search on Twitter (with the #) – you might be surprised at the enlightenment you walk away with. Teams, agencies, current events all have hashtags in 2013.
I really found the power of twitter during the 2013 flooding in Calgary. All the news agencies were releasing information to twitter, as was the Mayor, the Police and the City of Calgary. To be completely on top of what was happening, I only had to key in #abflood (That was the hashtag assigned to that news event. There were other hastags, but that was the main one) to my twitter account, and all the information was there – faster than on TV; faster than on Google. With pictures, videos and articles embedded.
I saw on Facebook that the Chicago Blackhawks had won the Stanley Cup. I wasn’t sure if that was accurate or not. My first instinct was to Google it. But with only approximately 23 seconds having passed from the time of the win, and the time of my search, no one had had time to write and article, or compose a blog post on the subject. So, I went to Twitter. I figured there were probably a few things I could search. I started with #StanleyCup and voila! Confirmation of the Blackhawks’ win! Equally effective, I’m sure, would have been to search “Blackhawks” or “Bruins” or some other variation of this. Basically, there was no way I could be wrong!!
If you are a business on Twitter…. set up your hastags and use them! Every time you post, tag it. Include your hastag on your business promotions. I will have to choose a hastag for Baragar Productions – to tag everything #BaragarProductions is perhaps not so great… it eats up 19 of my 145 characters! Then again, to be completely searchable… it’s probably worth it. In my teaching career, as we move to using Twitter more and more this coming school year, we will be tagging everything with #CMJHS – is it possible that someone else might also use that tag for something else? Sure it is. It’s not foolproof.
Here’s an example of how it is not foolproof. The Toronto Blue Jays this year are using the hastag #lovethisteam and are asking that when fans tweet about the Blue Jays they tag with that. The other day, I went to check the score in the game, and a girl had put up a tweet referencing something totally different – presumably a team she plays for – and she had tagged her tweet with #lovethisteam – I had to read her “news” two or three times to realize she was talking about something totally unrelated to the Toronto Blue Jays.
Do I really care about the opinion of everyone out there on Twitter? No way. It’s like anything on the Internet… you have to pick and choose. You have to discern. Anything you tweet can be seen by anyone. Who you choose to follow in your feed is worth selecting carefully. My feed has a lot of Educators and Technology people in it. I use Facebook for socializing, and I use Twitter for my career and professional growth. Each day, there are hundreds of excellent articles posted on my Twitter feed – all of which I would love to read and absorb. I will never be able to “keep up” – but Twitter has most certainly brought new life into my career, just for existing.
The hour of code is in its third year of existence, and I am proud to state that my classes have participated in it every year, meaning that of the millions of students who have participated, I have contributed over 1,000 kids to the initiative! The goal of the hour of code is to expose kids to code, and to showcase it as an important skill, and not one to be intimidated by. Last year, President Obama participated in the hour of code in the USA, and this year, Prime Minister Trudeau took part in Canada. “In the 21st century, computer science is just as important to a well-rounded education as chemistry, biology, or physics,” says Hadi Partovi, CEO of Code.org and creator of the Hour of Code campaign. I could not agree more.
We always start by watching this video:
Following the video, we discuss the reality of the economy in the Province of Alberta (heavily tied to oil), unemployment rates and peak oil (we have used up more than half the earth’s oil reserves, and once the oil is gone, it’s gone). We talk about what the jobs of the future are going to be in this province if not oil, and then we talk about coding as a skill set that everyone should have at least some knowledge of. Then students go to www.code.org and spend about a half hour learning a bit about code writing using the blockly interface.
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to tour more Makerspace environments in Calgary, Alberta. Unfortunately, one of our tours got canceled; the one which was set for Roots2Stem, as they were under the impression we were seeking to replicate their makerspace. I had actually been intending to use their Makerspace as the “grande finale” field trip to close off a series of maker dates in our junior/fledgling Makerspace in my own school, but alas, it is not to be. I am certain there is no way my itty bitty junior high budget could ever compete with their capitalist venture, but their message indicated, in no uncertain terms, that if we were going to “copy their space”, they were not willing to share their innovation with us.
But I digress. I came away from these tours with much more than just inspiration and insight into facilitating the maker movement, I also came away with a new insight into assessment in a technological environment. I had the opportunity to speak with Ken Christensen at Robert Thirsk High School in Northwest Calgary. His take on assessment in our field was what he terms “progressive” assessment as opposed to “outcomes-based assessment. Replication -> Modification -> Innovation. Essentially, if you can replicate what the instructor teaches, your grade falls around the 75% range. If you can take the learning and modify it, you move your assessment into the 85% range. And finally, taking the learning and applying it to innovate with something new, or to solve a problem moves you into the 95% range. Of course, these numbers are all “give or take” and are based on each scenario independently and uniquely, but it gave me a new take. Outcomes-based assessment in technology and in maker environments is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish. Many things, are either “can” or “can’t”, with not much in between the two. Bringing the skills into a larger framework of problem-solving and innovative thinking allows for a broader spectrum of achievement.
The