Image from Bitmoji.com

My BluePrint: “About Me” Lesson Ideas

A Magical Carpet Ride

I set out on this journey believing the following:

Children are unique with many individual strengths and must have a learning environment that supports their physical, mental, emotional, and social growth.
As an educator, I intend to create a safe, inclusive, calm, and positive environment where students feel encouraged to pursue their personal interests and take risks.
I hope students embrace their mistakes and feel pride for their many accomplishments.

Now, replace children and students with myself as a learner. In short, I began this inquiry project with little confidence in my abilities as a 21st century learner. My childhood communication tool to the outside world was a rotary dial phone.

Image from artfire.com

I felt too self-conscious to reach out for support from colleagues and was overwhelmed with help tutorials and video instructions on the internet.

I learned to change my growth mindset and develop a personal learning network. Carol Dweck, author of Mindset, The New Psychology of Success, urges us to praise the process and the resilience, YET, not the end product and natural talent, the NOW.

Image from bitmoji.com

In the article “Building a Growth Mindset for Teachers”, Jennifer Gunn outlines some sound advice that reflects my own key learnings from the course:

☝ Never Stop Growing.

✌ Experiment and Innovate.

👍 Ask Questions.

👌 Be Flexible.

✊ Reflect. Reflect. Reflect.

👏 Learn New Technology.

Bippity, boppity, boo! I did, I am, I will continue to.

My Blueprint is an online, visual student driven portfolio. I created a virtual classroom where students could practice self-awareness skills and explore their interests, abilities, and passions. They were able to use multimodal ways (video, audio, pictures) to document their growth. Other teachers in the school and families can also connect and have the same access as the teacher - post, comment, offer feedback, add stickers. It is most definitely a work in progress; the students' portfolio are emerging. By term 2, I would like to see us at developing, then proficient by June 2021. Here are a few samples (click to enlarge):

Image from student portfolio; Myblueprint.ca, 2020

As I look back on my first blog posts, I wanted to delve deeper into one digital tool that focused on growth of the individual learner. We were bombarded with new technology during remote learning, so I isolated My Blueprint and the About Me section. As Ron Weasley once said, “What’s life without a few dragons?” (J.K. Rowling, 2000)

1. TIME - We only had full sets of iPads alternate weeks and finding a large chunk of time, without interruptions to explore, was a rare treasure.

2. ABILITY - Some students were able to navigate the program with ease. Others spent most of their time just logging in. Thankfully we have been talking about "The Power of Yet" and students were praised on perseverance rather than completed work. No tears.

3. DEVICE SETTINGS - Some students didn't have their camera/video working. Others would crash because there were too many photos taking up space. Then there was the spinning wheel of impending crash and burn. We shrugged, tried other devices, e-mailed IT, again, thankfully, no tears.

4. COMPREHENSION - There was A LOT of background knowledge that needed to be taught and prepared; some that were understandable like explaining the abstract, symbolic concept of personal values and attributes. Then there were others like, "You don't know where your family is originally from? No, not Coquitlam, before that. No. Not Alberta, your great grandparents?"

5. COLLABORATION - In the past, I relied a lot on students supporting each other, but with COVID-19 restrictions, masks/no masks, and just for health & safety reasons, students were left waiting for support.

“There is still much worth in having a shared experience, a common narrative for learning.”

- Richardson, 2012

Moving Forward. . .

After I get valuable feedback from members of LIBE 477, I would like to do some touch-ups, download the Pages artifact into my school's Teams channels,

Image from tech community.microsoft.com

and discuss it during future grade group collaboration time with other primary teachers, our MBP leads at the school, and administration. I then would like to have a virtual meeting with the district's leads for more feedback, then upload the document to the district's Teams Channels under Digital Learning (gulp!). It’s looking pretty empty...

image from Teams, 2020

I’m feeling inspired by the creative innovators of this course and encouraged to know that their ideas for fostering literacy, building critical thinking skills using hybrid models, and vetted apps and digital programs are out there in the “technagical” venture.

Image from Bitmoji.com

Works Cited

Deak, J. (2016, August 23). Your Fantastic Elastic Brain READ ALOUD! ~ Stem for Kids

DoubleThink Inc. (2020). MyBlueprint.ca. Retrieved December 01, 2020, from https://myblueprint.ca/

Gunn, J. (2019, October 25). How to Build a Growth Mindset for Teachers: Resilient Educator. Retrieved December 01, 2020, from https://resilienteducator.com/classroom-resources/growth-mindset-for-teachers/

Kid Time StoryTime (Producer). (2016, August 23). Your Fantastic Elastic Brain READ ALOUD! ~ Stem for Kids [Video file]. Retrieved December 1, 2020, from https://youtu.be/8QSPfnQCIY0

Richardson, Will (2012). Why School? How Education Must Change When Learning and Information are Everywhere [eBook edition]. Ted Conferences.

Eyes on the World, Feet on the Ground

Earlier in the year, I decided it was time to have my philosophy, mission, vision statements, and core values set out in writing. With continuous professional development and learning, these principles will be fluid and change over time.

At present, I do see a classroom of engaged and inclusive learners, and I am continuing to work out on how to create a more collaborative environment that is viable during Covid times. Learning progress is moving much slower due to less physical collaboration (small group/pair work). Students just aren't "getting it" when they are having to trouble shoot alone.

What will the 21st Century Classroom look like?

The 21st century classroom I envision will always involve ways to facilitate critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity.

I have been very fortunate to be in a school where students have the ability to have a device available to them. We have loaner iPad carts and COWS. I have collaborated with my cohort teacher to have a class set of iPads every other week, while still having a half set available to me all the time. As the students have their own One Drive account, they are able to save and access any pertinent work throughout their school career in the district. In our SLLC, we have many loose parts and STEM materials available. Earlier in the year, we had keva planks and I individually bagged planks for students to work on challenges. Students will be working on making traditional Sto:lo tools out of recyclable materials, so this will be a nice introduction to some of the loose parts available in our SLLC.

image from kevaplanks.com

Design Considerations for Final Vision

I have been catching myself doing this a lot. While students are working, I will ask them "Why are we doing this?". Yes, I am prepared for the disappointment. My grade 3 students often do not know why they are working on assignments at school. The pleasers will give you an answer like "to make my brain grow/learn" and it is true, but how? I would like to explore the explicit process of learning for individual students, reflecting on this process in a documented way, as well as have students learn more about themselves, what drives their engagement and motivation. In a way, I would like to help facilitate their working philosophy, mission, and vision statements for their own learning.

I still intend on using MyBlueprint, a digital portfolio program designed for the B.C. Curriculum's core competencies in mind. The program is vast and complex, but I will focusing on the "About Me" section. Then move on to School competencies like communication thinking, and personal/social goals as well as their personal goals.

Who is my target audience?

image from 123rf.com

image from in.pinterest.com

image from pinterest.com

At the moment, the target audiences are students, their families, and the other grade 3 teachers I am collaborating with. In the future, I would hope this exploration can support other teachers that are wanting to use digital portfolios for teaching self-awareness and metacognitive skills.

Potential Ideas

image from Amazon.ca

https://www.amazon.ca/Handbook-Digital-Learning-K-12-Schools/dp/3319338064

Hourigan and Quinn have compiled timely articles that focus on learning in the digital classroom in their book entitled "Handbook On Digital Learning". Some interesting articles and chapters discuss narrated photographs with multimodal opportunities with digital tools, personalised learning with information technology, and discoveries from an Irish pilot project using EUFolio, a classrom ePortfolio. If you are a UBC student, this text is available for PDF download (See below in "works cited" for link).

Assessment Ideas

Students have completed a self-assessment questionnaire using emojis. I plan on using it in June to compare their responses. This is where I am having some challenges on finding evidence of growth for students and will be using my PLM (other grade 3 teachers and MBP leads in the district) to strengthen this area. Formative assessments, using exit slips, class discussions, and small group or one-to-one check-ins have been some ways I have brainstormed to support this. For the next collaboration meeting, I am hoping to get a bank of guiding questions that can give us more insight to the value of explicit teaching of self-awareness and metacognitive skills.

Digital Artifact ideas

My vision for the future would be to have students in my classroom use a digital portfolio like MBP to map their learning throughout the year, reflect on their growth, and set goals for future grades - see the bigger picture beyond the grade 3 classroom. After working out the bugs, I would definitely like to have a series of lesson plans, alongside quality literature (We have been BIG on read alouds this year and I would like to incorporate this) available for teachers with sample student work. We often do this in collaboration in our grade groups where we set a goal (organizing writing/using specialized vocabulary etc.) and work together to implement the collaborated activity/mini-lesson together. Then we set aside some time to compare work, develop a rubric, what we would think is emerging, developing, and proficient using examples, and revise as needed for the following term.

Final Considerations

How does exploring MBP self-awareness tools help students have their eyes on the world and feet on the ground? Our progress with the program will be on a bi-weekly time schedule, so this gives students time to input, discuss with their peers, respond to teacher feedback (teachers are able to respond with stickers, text, video, audio), and meaningfully reflect will all the resources visually organized in their portfolio. As for eyes on the world, students are also able to explore career possibilities within the program and correlate how their learning now may affect their learning in the future.

Works Cited

MyBlueprint.ca. (n.d.). Retrieved November 9, 2020, from https://myblueprint.ca/

Common Sense Media. (2020, April 01). Introduction to the 4 Cs. Retrieved November 14, 2020, from https://www.commonsense.org/education/videos/introduction-to-the-4-cs

Marcus-Quinn, A., & Hourigan, T. (Eds.). (2017). Handbook on digital learning for k-12 schools. Switzerland: SPRINGER from https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-33808-8#about

Shelby County Schools. "Inside the 21st Century Classroom." YouTube, 14 Nov. 2020, https://youtu.be/zcvcLuVtXU8

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Tuesday, December 1, 2020

LIBE 477 Digital Artifact - Diamond in the Rough