A New Year - A New School - A New Role

I have now official completed my first week of school as high school teacher. Wow! Is my life different, or has really changed immensely from this time last year. I am now a secondary school French Immersion educator at Thom Collegiate with an interesting teaching load full of content heavy classes. This year, I will be teaching, History, Social Studies, Francophonie, Science and Visual Arts to students in grades 9-12. The joy of teaching in French is that you always get a hodgepodge of subjects to teach. This should be interesting!

As I leap into this new role with both feet, I know I have a lot to learn and a lot to discover. But just like my students, I like to learn hands-on and I like to get my hands dirty with learning. My challenges will be many, but I have never been scared off of a new adventure. It just means I get to work with new material, new curriculum and bigger kids.

So far, my first experience with Thom Collegiate has been overwhelming but wonderful all at the same time. Most staff are friendly and very welcoming. My students are bigger, but really just bigger boddies filling the desks in my classroom waiting to learn something new.

This year, I want to not only focus on new curriculum and content, but I want to focus on how to make my secondary classroom an inquiry driven, project-based environment, supported through integrated technology whenever possible. Is this possible in content heavy high school classes? I guess I will find out! My goals include an effort to make my lessons more engaging and relevant to students, by not allowing them to be simply be direct-teacher instruction, but to eventually build the learning environment necessary that allows for student-directed learning to dominate my classroom. I want to experiment with Project Based Learning and engage my students through inquiry journeys of discovery. I also want to explore new ways to allow students to incorporate their hand held devices into my planned learning activities. Here's hoping a content heavy load of curriculum can still be taught through project based learning!

I wish all of my fellow teachers the best of luck as they embark on a new school year.

Using Go Animate in the Classroom

My preparations for the new school year continue with my latest effort... an animated writing prompt for my Grade 7s. As you may have read in my previous posts, I teach French Immersion so I'm always looking for new things that I can use that let me incorporate the French language into my classroom. I decided to play with a website called GoAnimate.

What I discovered was an easy to use, free website that allows me to insert characters, bacgrounds and objects into scenes and then animate their movements using a simple list of posibilities. I inserted their own music and some text. Then, voila, my first short animated feature!

For my first attempt, I created a writing prompt that would allow my students to create their own animated productions. The premise is simple; two students named Rosie and Jean are enjoying their last week of holidays before school starts and they want to experience one last adventure. What will this adventure be? They are asking the Grade 7s at Wilfrid Walker to help them decide what to do with their last week of freedom. Here is the short animation I created:

GoAnimate.com: Les aventures de Jean et Rosie à Wilfrid Walker by bobiashj


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

I hope they enjoy this activity. I can't wait to see what they come up with! My hope is that this is a successful writing activity that the students will want to revisit during the year to produce more adventures for "Jean and Rosie". I will post the results so stay tuned!

A School Transformation in Hamilton Ontario

I was browsing the ISTE website and came across an inspirational story. I decided that I had to share this digital story (video) made by Lawfield Elementary School in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada who had to reconstruct their school after a tornado. A news story was published on TheSpec.com about this school's design. It was designed with a Universal Design Vision. Here is the description they submitted to the ISTE website:

"After our community school was hit by a Tornado, the staff and students had to relocate for two years while a new school was being built. In March of 2008, this school, Lawfield, was constructed with a Universally Designed Vision. By
reallocating resources and using recycled furniture, principal William Demille made a commitment to transform this new school into a universally designed environment with Speaker systems in every classroom, Smartboards, document cameras and much more. The staff and students will always feel a sense of connection after experiencing such turmoil and change. The transformation has just begun."

Here is their video. I hope to make one about our school next year after we have gone through "Structural Innovation". I find a lot of what they are talking about similar to what we will be doing at our school next year.

My digital storytelling creations for students

I have now become an active digital storyteller in my personal and professional life. At school, most of the stories I've created for my students have been ones to introduce them to the new school year or to get them excited about a special project or unit or a year end reflection video that they received as a souvenir of our year together.

Here is an example:

New School Year

Here is a video I made for the beginning of the new school year to welcome parents and students to my classroom. I changed it slightly between the English and French versions because they were intended for different audiences.

I found the student version in French very useful to review rules and expectations on the first day of school. Students were much more interested because it was a video as opposed to me reading out a list of rules and expectations. They also got to see themselves in the story which caught their attention. After viewing the video, we had a good discussion about the upcoming year. I also found the video useful to show to students who didn't come the first day and for those students who came later in the year. They all received the same information in an interesting way.

The parent video was also useful at the Open House as I only had to answer questions and explain a couple of documents that I was handing out. At our school, you give the same presentation twice so it was great to have a video to ensure that parents were getting the same message regardless of the presentation they attended. The parents also enjoyed seeing their "kids in action" in the classroom. They could see it was a fun place where their child was interacting with others, was happy and seemed excited to be there. I also used the parent version when a potential family was touring the school, trying to decide if they should come to our school or go to another school. I showed them the video and the parents were convinced that our school was the right fit for their child.

English version for parents shown at the open house:

French version to show on the first day of school to the students:

New to Blogging

Although I took some great workshops on Social Networking and Blogging from Dean Shareski a few summers ago, I was never motivated enough to start my own blog. I didn't think I had enough to say or anything of substance to share with the world. I have since accumulated many projects that incorporate technology and ideas for future projects with my students. I was struggling with how to keep all of this "stuff" organized so I thought, why not start a blog of my own. Even if nobody is reading it, I will at least have a digital record I can refer to and reflect upon as my technology integration evolves in my teaching. Welcome to those of you who are following my journey.