Fall+Semester+2009



This term has been for me an exercise in juggling my classroom teaching, my extracurricular duties at school (organizing our school’s recycling team, serving for the first time as a school associate for a teacher-in-training) and my LTT field study project and course work.

My first learning statement springs from my field study, which makes use of the Epals.com website and email system to enable my Grade 4 students to communicate online with a class of similar-aged students in South Korea. Learning Statement 1 __** This learning statement is significant to me because I have spent much of my 20-some year teaching career trying to help students realize that children in the rest of the world don’t have many of the resources that we have in North America, that they sometimes can’t go to school because their teacher has been arrested or killed or hasn’t been paid. Children in developing countries often have to walk several kilometres to get to school, and their parents usually have to pay school fees, even if the education system is a public government-funded one. Of course, school children in developed countries don’t usually have to deal with these types of restrictions, but their education system can be very different, with different emphases, with more or less stringent criteria for advancement.
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 * I am learning to use collaborative technology tools to support global education in my classroom and my school. **

I want my students to realize that despite these differences, most children around the world have similar aspirations and/or experiences. My students’ epals in Korea have sent messages asking for their partner’s favorite sports, favorite TV shows, favorite foods, career goals, etc. Mind you, they have also given and asked for blood types – I’m not sure that’s a universal trait!

One element of our cross-cultural communication that has been a bit of a challenge is the language barrier. From the beginning, I knew that the Korean students were learning English, although I didn’t know what stage they are at currently. I thought that one advantage for my students would be that they would need to write very clear, simple, grammatically correct messages for the Korean kids to understand. This has, for the most part, been true, although it’s hard for me to edit, or have the student edit, outgoing messages for grammar, spelling and syntax errors; neither I nor my students can edit a message once it has been written and sent into the system. I have to approve every message going out, but I can’t edit it, only approve or reject it. The quality of English language coming back is sometimes okay, other times hardly decipherable. In the latest messages from Korea, several students interspersed Korean words (in Roman script) into their English sentences, which made for quite a challenge for me and the kids! The evidence of my learning ** in this statement is inherent in the results of my on-going epals project. I started out not having had any international email experience other than communicating with old friends in Europe. I didn’t know what to expect when I registered with Epals and made up my profile for other teachers to see. I felt a bit like someone putting an ad in the Personals column of the Georgia Straight – “Middle-aged, attractive, straight guy with 28 dependants seeks relationship with adult in similar situation, anywhere on Planet Earth. Object – collaboration on academic projects.” Connection to educational theory ** The reading I have done in this area, including an article by two educators involved in a similar cross-cultural communication project in Minnesota, outlines a very clear raison-d’etre for this type of educational endeavour: //Teachers are becoming convinced that global telecommunications projects in elementary classrooms are an excellent tool for integrating reading, writing, arithmetic and reasoning with all of the subject areas as students complete meaningful projects with students in other countries.(Bagley and Hunter, __Global Telecommunications Projects: Reading and Writing with the World__, 1995, p. 3) //
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This element of working towards a meaningful goal, i.e. writing for a real purpose, is primordial. Students are motivated by writing to someone who will read their communication and respond. This has been an important goal of our LTT program, facilitating students using technology for a meaningful communicative purpose, not just for the teacher.

It also meshes very nicely with the Constructivist theory of education: //During project development, students (and teachers) discover that they are responsible for, and in control of, their own learning. Students shift from memorizing facts to figuring out how to manipulate information. They pursue interdisciplinary learning and look at information in new ways. Additionally, in these projects, there is increased socialization and a sort of collective creativity. Teachers have noticed increased moral and emotional support as students improve in their ability to problem-solve. (Bagley and Hunter, __Global Telecommunications Projects: Reading and Writing with the World__, 1995, p. 7) // The LTT capacities ** that I have grown in through this learning are: My goals ** for the short term with this project are: 
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 * Participate in and help develop learning communities to support your teaching practice
 * Use, evaluate and integrate existing and emerging technologies into your practice
 * Draw on educational theories, research and philosophies to inform your use of technologies to support teaching and learning
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">To facilitate students’ ongoing integration of this collaborative project into their daily learning by arranging for them to use the one Emac computer in our classroom to communicate with their epal on a rotating basis. Currently, they are only able to do their epals work one or two periods per week in the computer lab.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">To encourage and help the Korean teacher feel comfortable allowing her students to collaborate with my class in a Science project which involves recording and reporting weather data in both locales.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">To investigate other ways of using technology (blogging, wikis, video, etc.) to enhance my students’ experience of and with their Korean counterparts.


 * __ [[image:IMGP7831.JPG width="292" height="222"]]<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[[image:IMGP7849.JPG width="279" height="219" align="right"]]

Learning Statement 2 __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Throughout most of my years of teaching, I have wanted to and done my best to control what and how my students learned. After all, I was supposed to teach “the curriculum”, help my students meet all those prescribed learning outcomes, do my best to “cover the course content”. I often became quite frustrated with the restrictions I felt being placed on me and my passion for teaching stuff that mattered, stuff that the kids were interested in, topics that would grab their creative, energetic minds, bodies and souls.
 * I am learning to allow and encourage my students to find their own way to meet curriculum objectives. **

Eight years ago, after a particularly rough year in middle school French Immersion, I learned that I have the infamous condition “ADHD”, although I usually prefer to omit the “H” in the moniker (I find “ADD” easier to say, it sounds less traumatic or pathological). That revelation helped to explain many of the challenges I had encountered in 18 years in the classroom, and one period of four years that I spent working in anything that didn’t involve standing in front of 30 noisy, uninterested kids for 5 hours a day.

Back to my learning statement…. Since I switched to elementary teaching 8 years ago, and didn’t have to cram whatever activity students and I were involved in into 45 or 50 minute blocks, I have realized that teaching can actually be exciting and fun (and maybe even beneficial for the young people I share the classroom with). The Grade 4 class I had last year was so creative, so flexible, so cohesive, that they probably could have taught themselves most of what was in the curriculum. They just needed an adult in the room to see that they didn’t tear it apart in their enthusiasm.

This year, my group of 27 little darlings isn’t quite as creative, as industrious or as cohesive as last year’s. I am finding it much harder to keep them moving along, especially in Language Arts and Math, without leaving a few stragglers running along behind with dazed expressions on their faces. The fact that my class includes three kids on IEP’s - one with very pronounced but undiagnosed ADD, another with autism, and a third with psychological challenges from birth – adds to the complexity of the learning styles and abilities in the class.

Oh yes, my learning statement… One thing I have discovered in the three short months of this term is that my students can meet many PLO’s, especially in the Language Arts area, by doing what they normally do very well, talk and tell stories. It often springs spontaneously from an activity I have planned for them, but they take it and add a twist or two.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> These kids demonstrated good oral language skills, sharing, composing and creating for a real audience. I would not have thought that they would be so enthused to share their stories with each other so spontaneously. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I can relate this learning to aspects of constructivism and communification. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">My students constructed their own learning about salmon spawning from their own observation and personalization of individual fish. They compared the new ideas of fish spawning with their experience of cheering for contestants in a race. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The learning I have gained in this area relates closely to the first 3 of these elements. In these various activities, students had communication as their main goal (especially the Hallowe’en stories), they achieved unification of purpose (the moon-watching and salmon watching), and they sought and found communal experiences (in all three).
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Evidence of this learning **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">One rainy morning in early or mid-October, we skipped out of an assembly and walked down to Scott Creek (I mean the creek, not the school) to watch the salmon that were spawning. The kids were fascinated by the number of fish climbing and squirming over each other to get upstream, how they would get pushed back and have to start all over again, how they were all bruised and sick-looking and could still swim so hard against the current. One or two kids started naming the fish: Bob, Fred, Susan, etc. They chose their favorite one and cheered them on. For 10 minutes there was a rousing chorus of “Go Bob!” “Come on Fred!” “You can do it Susan!” At first I thought they were being rather silly, but I quickly realized that was their way of integrating the fish’s struggle to reproduce into their own frame of reference, their own understanding. It was like being at a soccer game or an Olympic ski race. The students came back and wrote journal entries and stories about their favorite salmon. I put photos of our salmon-watching experience on our class Sharepoint site and two of them are at the top of this section.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">They were all dressed in their Hallowe’en finest on October 30. Chips, cookies and juice were abundant on their desks. Not many days before, I had set up a microphone and speaker so the quieter kids in the class could be heard when they spoke. One of the boys asked if he could use the microphone to tell a ghost story to the class. I thought “Good idea, I don’t have to think up games or other things to keep you guys busy for the next hour.” So he got up and told a good tale of ghosts, goblins and haunted houses. Several other students wanted to tell stories too. The autistic boy got up and told a great story of Transformers at Hallowe’en; he would have gone on all day if I let him.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In early September I started the same moon-watching exercise with the class that Eleanor Duckworth used in her article “The Having of Wonderful Ideas”. My students and I watched the moon set in the morning, sometime after 9:00, as it was waxing. One morning we sat outside for half an hour waiting to see it come out from behind a cloud, as it was supposed to set around 9:45, but it must have already gone below the houses and trees west of the school. We took lots of pictures of it, day and night. They sketched what they saw and asked questions about why it did what it did. Why was it getting bigger or smaller? Where was the light that illuminates the moon coming from? Why does it sometimes rise and set during the night, and sometimes during the day? Their journals are full of observations, wonderings, and drawings of the moon. Then on Oct. 9, NASA sent that rocket crashing into the moon to check for ice on the surface – I couldn’t have planned the timing better myself. We are still watching it during these sunny, cold days and dark, cold nights in early December. It was full just last week. We haven’t come to any hard and fast conclusions about why it does what it does, but they are watching it with new interest.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Connection to educational theory **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Vanessa Domine defines “Constructivism” on page 100 of her book __Rethinking Technology in Schools__: //…a theory of learning based on the idea that humans actively construct their own knowledge based on their own perceptions and understandings.” //**and** // “It is through situational contexts that teachers and students acquire new understandings as they compare new and unfamiliar ideas with previously established ones.”//
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">On pages 117 to 122 of the same book, Domine presents a definition of ‘Communification’ and then describes 4 elements of it as it relates to education and technology: //1) Human communication is paramount, 2) Achieve unification of purpose, 3) Seek communal experiences, and 4) Education as social (re)construction.//

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The LTT capacities **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> that I have grown in through this learning are:
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Engage in a critical cycle of action-reflection to understand and develop your practice
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Draw on educational theories, research and philosophies to inform your use of technologies to support teaching and learning
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Use, evaluate and integrate existing and emerging technologies into your practice
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">My goals **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> for the short term in this area are:
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">To be more open to these kinds of learning experiences when my students suggest them or need more active ways of learning
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">To be always looking for creative, interactive and authentic learning experiences – my experience has shown that students usually learn best this way