Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics

With only 30 days to go, Olympic fever has been spreading rapidly through my classroom. We have been counting down the days to the openning ceremony since the first day of school. Students come to school on a regular basis and tell me about a story they heard about this athlete or that venu. We also adopted a former student who was named to the Canadian Olympic Long Track Speed Skating Team yesterday, Lucas Makowsky. We can't wait to follow his progress and cheer him on during the games. We have set-up a page on our website to track Lucas and to showcase some of the things we have done to support him thus far. Check it out at: http://wilfridwalker.rbe.sk.ca/makowsky

For the students that weren't as excited as the others, they have come on board and joined the band wagon. It helps that the Olympic Torch Relay passed through our city during the weekend giving most of us a more direct connection to the games. I made a video to document the torch's visit to our city over the weekend. You can check it out below. My appologies in advance for some of the shaky cinematography. I need to invest in a tripod. Here it is:

It also helps that my class started working on their online collaborative project on Monday.You can check out our progress over the next 6 weeks on the collaborative project wiki: http://2010olympics.wikispaces.com/

For us, it is a big deal that we are the host country for the Winter Olympic Games. It has been 22 years since we have last hosted such an event. I'm wondering if other people that aren't Canadians are as excited as we are about the start of the games? Or, if you are a Canadian Teacher, are you working on a special project? What are you doing to study the Olympics in your classroom?

Time Well Spent?

Sometimes I question all the extra hours I put into making things possible in my classroom. Is it really worth it? Does the extra time actually make a difference?

If you read this blog, you are likely an educator and can relate to the hours required after school to get the job done. Likely you spend even more hours than that to do your job well. Because I enjoy most of the things I do for my job, I don't really notice the extra time I put in. I have spent a lot of extra hours lately setting up a number of cyber projects for my students; Classblogmeister, Google Docs, 1001 Flat World Tales and an email exchange with a class in Australia.

My goal in participating in all of these projects was to get my students excited about learning and to give them the opportunity to collaborate and to learn online with others around the world. Being the person I am, I can't just do one project at a time, I have to do a number of things at once. Does anyone else have this problem? You start one project and then you see the connection and possibility in another, and it snowballs from there. After many sleepless nights as of late, I was questionning if it was all worth it.

Today, after finally getting everyone set-up on their accounts over the past few days, I couldn't help but get caught up in the excitement of my students as they showed each other how to navigate their way through the programs and applications we were using. They were so excited to try new things and to show each other what they had learned. Their enthusiasm was contagious and I left the school later feeling rewarded for the time I spent setting up our "Cyber School".

Tonight, when I logged into my school Google account to share a document with my students, I noticed that over half my class was online using the chat feature offered through their school Google accounts. Now I know that they would likely be doing this through MSN if they didn't have these accounts, but to see them actually using something school related after hours when they had other options, was very rewarding.

What made my night was when one of my students noticed that I was online and sent me a message that said: "ok.......you are the best teacher on earth!!! Thank you for getting us all connected and stuff."

Funny how you can put so much effort into connecting your students with others around the world, and in the end, they are just as happy to have the chance to be able to connect with each other. After receiving a 'virtual thank you hug' from a student, I guess it really was time well invested.

Integrating Technology in Heritage Fair for Teachers and Students

I am passionate about teaching Canadian History and Heritage. One of the ways I share this passion with my students in our involvement in Heritage Fair every year. Most of my students look forward to this time of year. They can't wait to get started in this project based learning experience and start talking about their topic in September. I think it is because they have the chance to explore a topic they are interested in and that they get to choose themselves. Their enthusiasm for the project makes it my favourite time of year as well.

A video I have created and have used in many ways is a promotional video for Heritage Fair. I have used this video in school to get students excited about their projects. I have also used this video to introduce teachers to the Heritage Fair process during the professional development workshop I give to interested Regina Public Schools teachers on Heritage Fair every year. Thank you to Dean Shareski for giving me the video footage of the Moose Jaw Regional Fair to use in my video.

I have also ventured into wikis with the creation of my first public wiki. On this Heritage Fair wiki, I have accumulated a number of documents, links and resources for teachers including a link to the video. It has now been used in a number of schools in my system and it has even been used in other districts for the promotion of Heritage Fair.

Another addition to my Heritage Fair file has been the creation of a custom Google search engine developped with Terry Pon. I was first introduced to the concept of custom search engines by Alan November at the TLt Summit in Saskatoon last year. This was the first one that I have used with my students and it has been quite successful. We chose Canadian websites to send students to such as Historica, the Canadian Encyclopedia and the Government of Canada collection as well as the CBC. By using this custom search engine, I have found their online research to be much more productive this year than in years past. The main problem with online research using regular Google for this grade level (4/5) is that they tend to use the first website that pops up in Google and then they think they are done their research. Because their topics are so diverse, it is hard to just direct them to a website or two.

The other challenge I'm experiencing is having them realize the importance of mainting a list of sources for their project while doing their reasearch (in books, online, etc). I find that I'm constently repeating myself when talking about crediting sources in their projects and that "Google" is not a source. There is always an endless number of opportunities to teach "digital citizenship" when working on Heritage Fair.