Beyond Blogging – Aviva Dunsiger

As mentioned on Monday, I’d like to try something a little different so please hang in there with me.

You know that I’m a big fan of Ontario Educators and their blogging efforts.  I have no intention to drop that because there are so many that have poured their deepest thoughts into personal blogs and continue to do so.  A look through the Livebinder will show you the wit and wisdom of so many.  It continues to grow and I fully intend to continue with my Friday TWIOE posts.

But there are some great things that appear other than in the traditional blog.  I’d like to take this week to identify and share other media that is being used to share thoughts.  It’s certainly not complete but should serve as a nice inspiration for you to consume and, hopefully, branch out to something different for yourself.

Since we’re in education, we know that there have to be rules.  So, my rule in order to make this list was that you have to show evidence of doing multiple things in the media.  I think we’ve all done one ofs.  Those are experiments.  Do it more frequently and it becomes a series and makes it eligible for this series.  Hey, my blog, my rules.

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Many educators use Twitter to share what’s happening in their classroom with the world.  It’s a way for parents and friends to get a glimpse of just what is happening .  These can be wonderful memories for families and a nice start to the conversation “What did you do at school today?”  It’s a way to challenge the response “nuthin” because you have visual proof!

For all the ease of Twitter, its power is seizing the moment as it happens; looking back over a period of time can be a difficult chore.  Particularly, if your timeline is full of content from everywhere.

This post from Jenny Luca has alway stuck with me – especially the image.  Evolution of an Information Junkie

If you follow Aviva on Twitter, you know that she is involved with conversations all over the web.  During her working hours, she is indeed providing educational stories and imagery from her classroom.  If you’re a parent, you can just leave your Twitter feed set to Aviva and you’ll get a good idea of how the day went.

Seriously, though, who has the time or inclination to do that?

To help the case, Aviva uses the power of Storify to memorialize each and every day that she calls Marvellous Mondays, Terrific Tuesdays, Wonderful Wednesdays, Terrific Thursdays, and Fantastic Fridays.

Storify is a very powerful utility.  I’ve used it in the past to collect Twitter messages for a conference, as an example.  Rather than weave your way through message after message, Storify presents it all at a single link.  In my example, it was easy to extract messages from so many different people because they had all used the same hashtag with their messages.

In Aviva’s case, every day in her classroom has been captured here.  https://storify.com/avivaloca

Personally, I think this is a technique that many people could make use of.  It doesn’t have that steep of a learning curve and you have everything captured for as long as you want.

The immediate benefit is the sharing with others that can happen.

But it could go further.

You could take a look back and reflect on an event, series of events, or learning experience and make plans going forward.

Imagine going into a performance appraisal, job interview, or a parent/teacher conference with all this evidence of learning in hand!