"One Thing" for Thurs. Oct. 31

Hallowe'en. One of the best days of the year to be a teacher. Getting to dress up is amazing.

Here's my favourite group costume from today:

Can you guess what they are? They're even in the right order. 

Stay safe out there!

"One Thing" for Wed. Oct. 30

The 100 Word Challenge, (found HERE) is a place that features "creative writing for young people". Writing challenges are provided with a 100 word limit and a one week deadline. Typically, it's a short written 'writing prompt' that is given, but we found one (the deadline had already passed) but it intrigued us so we wrote on this one:

The idea of the site is that a whole bunch (over 700 students on this topic, anyway) can write about the topic, submit their work (via their blog) and then read the work of others and make comments. Our class discussed how to make positive comments and tried this out today. It was neat to see where the students doing this (many are in the UK) are writing, commenting and posting from.

The next step for us is to get our class blog going and then we are going to submit some of our work for real. Why? Well, it has been determined that while the average student will probably turn in work of a "pretty good" quality for their teacher, any work that is published online and has an audience (whether it's anonymous children from elsewhere on the globe or their parent or a friend from their soccer team) it's likely that will mean that it's going to be of a "higher" quality. And ultimately that's what we're looking for...

"One Thing" for Tues. Oct. 29

Today in computer class I tried out using a "wall" with www.padlet.com . It went pretty well (see below). On their computer (using a link to get there) students were able to post comments in a free association kind of way. I asked my grade 1 and 2 computer class what they liked about school. They were asked to type their name and an answer below that. Not all of them could, but most tried. This exercise also taught them to act as a responsibly digital citizen as their posts were seen by others, and while we did get a few: "Minecraft is awesome" type comments, most were on topic even if they weren't spelled correctly. My favourite comment was "I like counting" and then this student gave examples with real numbers…it showed understanding at a deeper level.

This was quick and easy to use, could be exported to a PDF, or emailed out once finished, was a good way to get students to interact and could be manipulated in terms of backgrounds etc.
I will definitely use it again as a replacement for me standing at the whiteboard when we are in the lab or with my class if they had mobile devices in our class as a brainstorming method. Not only do they get to put something up immediately without having to walk to the front of the class, but you can keep (or share) the info afterwards too!

Thanks to Cale Birk for the suggestion and demonstration at the BCPVPA conference on Friday.

"One Thing" for Mon. Oct. 28

I thought I would share the results of our "Walk to School" campaign that finished up on Friday. One of things I am proud about is my commitment to the environment. Until recently, I biked to school almost every day. This wasn't always the case for me, but I was inspired and "kicked into gear" to do it by other riders who showed me that it could be done. It just took a bit of a leap to try.  

At Diefenbaker, it is one of my hopes as a vice principal to pass on some of my passion for the environment to our students. So, when we received information and posters from the people at Dash BC about their iWalk week in the second week of October, we thought it would be a great thing to do as a school. Unfortunately, our grade 6/7 students were at camp during that period. We still wanted to do it, however,so we waited until after Thanksgiving. Who would've thought the weather would have been so cooperative in late October? 

We did a similar campaign back in June and in that week we had a total of 70% of students either walking, riding or rolling to school. We also allowed those who are coming from far away (due to Late French Immersion) to drive part way and then walk in the rest of the way. The highest class was at 100% for the week-as they were all bringing their bikes for some class bike rides. The lowest was at 37%. Being June we decided that we would give out Freezies to both the primary and intermediate classes that had the best percentage of walkers over the course of the week.  

 

This time, we did not go for Freezies, but gave out "The Golden Shoe" trophy again as well as some funky sunglasses as prizes. Our results were good, but not as high as in June. This time our results were a bit more consistent across the classes and we had an overall rate of 60%. The highest was 80% and the lowest 43%. Keeping track of the numbers wasn't that hard to do (thanks to an excel spreadsheet) and the student runners from my class who would just go around during silent reading each afternoon to see who was absent and who walked). Hopefully when we do it again this year, these totals will be something we can build on and we can help see students and parents that it's a great way to get to school.

"One Thing"

This will be an educational blog. My first post, however is not. One Thing, a song by Canadian rockers Finger Eleven is an important song for me, as well as the 'theme' for me on this blog.

Each school day, I will endeavor to share "One Thing" in this space. It may be about something that happened at school (great or otherwise), something I learned or something fun or funny (Fun Fridays). By doing this every day, I hope to be able to get people to view the blog consistently and keep me writing consistently. In a way, it's similar to the 184 Days of Learning Blog concept that the Parkland School District runs. I just learned about this from George Couros, an educational tweeter extrordinaire" who was a guest speaker at the BCPVPA conference I attended on Friday. Thanks to the conference and George in particular for inspiring me to finally get this going. I had the blog title, concept and everything ready to go since September 2012, but it's been on the backburner until today.

George asked administrators why they weren't blogging and many said because they had nothing to share. I disagree (that's why I want to share) and found this quote from Josh Stumpenhorst very appropriate: "If you're not doing work worth sharing, do different work, or change your attitude about the work you do." I want people to see what we are doing at school. This is one way to do that. So is our Diefenbaker Technology blog that we have just set up this year: http://diefenbakertechnology.blogspot.ca/ where we have a page for each class and some classes are posting some of the work they are doing there.

So, back to the "One Thing" for today...Sometimes it takes a few listens to a new song for you to figure out exactly what the lyrics are saying and what they mean. For me with the song One Thing, I understood what was being said the first time I heard it. While I am sure the songwriter had a different person in mind for the “One Thing” he was writing about, to me, the lyrics meshed perfectly with what had recently become the most important thing in my life. You see, I had become a father for the first time in June of 2003 around the time this song was released. My son, Nolan was now everything to us. Every time I hear it now, it takes me back to how my life changed when he arrived and how excited I was to have a son and to see him grow up. These days my "One Thing" is actually "two" things; my two children, Nolan and now Bronwyn. They keep things in perspective for me, make me smile every day and the three of us are realizing that we are stronger together.