It’s another Friday and a chance to take a look at some of the recent blogging entries from Ontario Edubloggers.
Exploring By The Seat of Your Pants
There are some amazing things that can happen when you share the best of ideas and opportunities. Brenda Sherry does this in this post.
She’s been well versed in the Exploring by the Seat of your Pants project in a number of professional learning events that she’s been a part of. Recently, she actually got to bring the power of connections to a classroom in her own school.
Junior students got to participate in an interaction with a Canadian marine biologist. Along with students from many other diverse places.
When you think about the traditional guest speaker, they drop in and talk and leave. The power in this model is that it’s recorded and shared via YouTube. In this way, you can revisit the event and also use it in other years. Heck, since it’s publically available, you’re not just limited to the one that your class used.
It sounds like a wonderful learning experience happened. The big takeaway for you, reader, is how to get involved in your own classroom by bringing an expert into there. Details are included in Brenda’s post.
You can’t argue with statistics. In this post on the Heart and Art blog, Michelle Fenn sets the stage.
According to a recent report* by ICTC (the Information and Technology Information Council) Canadian women represent about 50% of the overall workforce but represent only 25% of the technology industry workforce.
We’ve known this forever, it seems, and yet the inequities still exist. Michelle offers some good suggestions to help change things in your own school.
I think it needs to go further though. If we know that this is a problem then there should be an educational way to fix it. But, until it becomes a compulsory part of the curriculum, we’re left with good people trying their best. That pales in comparison to what can happen if it’s done systemically and supported well with a common set of tools and pedagogy.
In addition to the suggestions in the post, check out the NCWIT website for updates on their activities and for free resources.
Until the situation is formally recognized though, students will still be subjected to hit and miss approaches and cutesy little standalone professional learning activities.
Privilege Masquerading as Superiority
A secondary school teacher who is doing something about this is Tim King. This post details his efforts and observations as he takes an all-female team to the Cybertitan competition.
Tim weaves an interesting story involving both observation and action.
Some of these observations are disturbing.
– where are all the girls?
– A number of people (oddly all male) grumbled about the all-female wildcard spot
– taking an all-female crew to this event had me constantly seeing micro-aggressions I might have otherwise missed
– we were only there because we’re a girl’s team
– as she reached for the pen a boy from another team stepped in front of her like she wasn’t there
And there’s more. You need to set aside a significant amount of time to read this post where even creating the learning environment was not supported by the school district and the students had to build their own computers.
My apologies, in advance, to Sue Dunlop. When I saw the title of this post, I thought it read “Youse guys” and that it was going to be a fun little post about literacy.
Instead, it’s about the expression that is used to refer to a group of people.
yes, “guys’ is a male term, not a neutral one
From the post, it’s clear that Sue has either been in a group that was addressed this way or she saw it being used in that way. Either way, it inspired her to write about it.
She offers some alternatives to use in the post.
Most importantly, it’s a reminder that our choice of words is important. It serves as a reminder to me of the importance of an objective peer coach.
This applies to writing as well. I hope that I don’t use expressions that would offend; I would hope that readers feel comfortable enough to let me know when I do; and I would hope that I would take that as an opportunity to avoid doing it again.
One of the powerful things about blogging is that, at least for now, your thoughts will be there forever. (or until you delete it or the service goes away or … well, you get my meaning)
One of the things that Patt Olivieri will have a chance to do with her son is share this post when he’s old enough to fully appreciate it.
In education, we know all about assessment, evaluation, and data points. Our system and our jobs thrive on it. It’s one of the things that separate education workers from other workers. It’s scientific, artistic, and humanist all at the same time.
It’s not as powerful as a mother’s love for her child.
You see, my love, there is no test for all of this, no grade, no level that can ever capture the everyday, ordinary stuff that accumulates to the only stuff that can ever be measured in immeasurable ways.
Wow.
If you’re a parent, you’ll be moved by this post.
When Political Penny-Pinchers Pilfer Your PD
Alanna King didn’t post this to her personal blog (at least not yet) so I kind of stumbled onto it on the Canadian School Libraries site.
It was great to see a former colleague quoted in Alanna’s post. A bit of trivia – her office had a window, mine didn’t.
There are two major topics that Alanna addresses in this post.
- Why should teacher-librarians self-direct their professional development?
- How should teacher-librarians find sources of professional development?
It was good to see that the Bring IT, Together Conference and #ECOOcamp made her list. It goes much further than that and you’ll find yourself tired when you read about Alanna’s endeavours and recognized that they’re all tacked on top of her day job, including writing this post.
There was another area that I thought she could have addressed more completely and, perhaps it’s in a future post, but in addition to her involvement as a participant in things, she is also a highly sought after presenter.
If you’ve ever been a presenter yourself, and what teacher hasn’t in some form, you know that the research and preparation that goes into that can be some of the best professional learning that you’ll ever do. Unlike the professional that repeats the same session over and over again, changing your topics and focus regularly keeps you from going stale.
A MODEST SOTL PLAN: WORKING WITH LITERARY PASSAGES
Now, here’s something completely different from James Skidmore. It falls from a reflection on student abilities from a course that he just taught. He notes that they’re good readers but …
What they can’t do, however, or at least not do very well, is identify passages or quotations from the novel that can be used as the cornerstone for a commentary on the larger text, and then build a commentary based on that passage.
I’d never really thought about this. Now that I have, I would like to think that that is part of what I’m trying to do with these regular Friday posts. I guess it’s a bit of a confession that I try to apply this technique to blog posts which are, by design, short and typically focus on one thing. How would I make out in a larger text? I’ve never thought about it and I wonder.
James has done some research and finds that there isn’t much that has been done already. What to do? He’s going to make it a project for eCampusOntario Extend mOOC . You can read about it and there’s a link to a collaborative document in his post.
I wonder if there are any other teachers of Language that would be interested.
And that’s a wrap.
Like always, some great thinking from Ontario Educators. Please take the time to honour their efforts by clicking through and reading the original.
Then, follow them on Twitter.
This post originally appeared on:
https://dougpete.wordpress.com
If you read it anywhere else, it’s not original.
doug -- off the record 
Please share your thoughts here. I’d enjoy reading them.