On Sketchnote and Making!

Curation for MOD#9

Gonna do it! I am going to fearlessly embrace sketchnoting! For those of you who may be trying to puzzle out what sketchnoting is... behold, this lovely video:

Basics involve immersing yourself into your topic and putting your thoughts on paper through drawings/doodles, writing, shapes and visual elements to create a visual map of the subject at hand. It engages deeper concentration and builds active listening skills.

In my typical neurotic thinking way, I sat and stared at the paper for a LONG time... I didn't want to "make a mistake" or have it look bad but if there was ever a topic that sketchnoting was meant for, Making! has got to be it. So I did it! Here is my first attempt to take notes on an article I was reading:

My first sketch note!!!

I must admit, I like the way it turned out and it wasn't too hard once I got going.

Loertscher's article really got me thinking about the possibilities of what I could bring to my library. I want to give my students the opportunity to explore and experiment and play - testing the waters, if you will! The article reminded me that each of us approach learning in different ways and for those are that visual or like working with their hands or who think outside of the box, Making is a true avenue of discovery.

Being thoroughly inspired by the article and with sketchnoting, I took the opportunity to use this doodling skill with my students at a family group meeting. The theme was "Peace" as we were preparing for our Remembrance Day Assembly. This meeting was a chance for students and teachers to engage in discussion of what peace meant to each of us and to present our findings in the form of a peace dove. I chose to share Todd Parr's The Peace Book. Prior to reading, I showed a short video clip on sketchnoting and then presented my own example to the students. With their questions answered, paper and markers were handed-out, and I read the book several times as the students drew. We were all thrilled with the result...

Percy's Rainbow Polar Bears' Peace Dove

Student feedback was positive and several asked if they could do sketchnoting more often or in class. One teacher saw the dove and asked about the process which I happily shared.

I also visited Maker Ed and spent much too long engrossed in amazing ideas for getting started and I lost myself in a crazy rabbit hole spiral where links lead to new links. Such excitement!!!

Some possibilities in my school library:

• I have a computer area with desktop computers - possibility of removing several computers and building in a material storage shelf above and utilizing countertop for a makerspace (shift to laptop use when computers needed)
• knitting club (several teachers at the school with these skills)
• inspiration from Anna Crosland (@crosland_a) to keep literature in Maker education; develop cross-classroom/grade collaborative projects; utilize prep coverage blocks to make
• reaching out to district mentors to gain insight
• launch off a recently finished novel study with gr. 4/5 to make cardboard creations
• I love games... introducing new games to students and having them make their own to teach and share
• just start something and try it out!

Work referenced

Loertscher, D.V. (2014). Makers, self-directed learners, and the library learning commons. Teacher Librarian, 41(5), 35, 38, 71.

Web 2.0 Toolkit

Curation for MOD#8

There has been a boom in digital tools presented to teachers and educators in recent years. 

"The rate at which new sites have been released is absolutely dizzying. Every time you turn around, it seems there is a new site being heralded as the latest and greatest." (Dembo, S., & Bellow, A., 2013)

The sheer number is staggering with many overlapping in function or varying in ease of use or useful for different student age groups. 

When gathering any of these tools for my toolkit, I was trying to keep in mind, the Five C's of Digital Curation Framework as put forth by Sharma and Deschaine (2013): Collection, Categorization, Critiquing, Conceptualization and Circulation. I am finding at this point that I have done a lot of Collecting and Categorizing but I am only starting with the critiquing of these tools. With many, I have only looked at them in the broadest of terms and I will need to try them out in a more meaningful way in order to properly know if they meet the requirement and standards of what I am hoping to use them for. However, it has been great fun exploring and discovering what was out there.

I have chosen to assemble my Toolkit on an Edshelf, "a socially curated discovery engine of websites, mobile apps, desktop programs, and electronic products for teaching and learning." If I was going to find useful tools, this to me was a great place to start. Edshelf allows you to curate multiple shelves, for example, if I wanted to gather all of my design tools on one shelf and curations tools on another, I could. There does not appear to be a way to sub-divide one shelf, however, so I have decided to put all the tools onto one shelf for this task. I have presented the shelf in list format so that my notes are visible and will show why I chose to include these tools.


My Web 2.0 Toolkit:

The following are some examples of these tools in use as I experiment:

Symbaloo
A global bookmarking tool.
I used it to provide my students with a direct link to relevant web tool sites as we worked on the GRA during their library time.

*I did encounter some difficulty with the Symbaloo bookmarker tool on my Mac. It was not working properly - response from their IT (Oct. 31/17) stated, "we are currently experiencing trouble with the Symbaloo Bookmarking tool on Mac OS. Our development team is aware of the issue. They have relayed that there is no set estimated time as to when the bookmarker tool issue will be resolved."

Pearltrees
A global bookmarking and curation tool. Easy to group and share multimedia finds.
Uses in the library:

• gathering themed information/resources for teachers and students in the school as a base for research and projects (eg. Kindness; Biomes and habitats; Simple Machines; Social Justice)
• to put link in one place when presenting to students (eg. author visits)

Ms_percevault

Pinterest
Curation board for ideas galore.
Use in the library to collect examples for intended projects or get/share ideas. I had not used my Pinterest boards in a while and I was pleased to discover that there have been improvements in the ability to organize boards in numerous sub-sections.





Canva
Useful for students to create beautiful designs for presentations or projects.
For the Global Read Aloud this year, I used Canva to design a digital postcard to supplement the hand-drawn one students sent out.

Padlet
Collaborative bulletin board.
Sharing our learning with a buddy class in the USA while reading Mem Fox's books in this Padlet for the GRA.

Work cited

Dembo, S., & Bellow, A. (2013). Untangling the web: 2.0 tools to power up your teaching. Thousand Oaks: CA. p.viii-x

Sharma, Sue Ann & Deschaine, Mark E. (2016). Digital Curation: A Framework to Enhance Adolescent and Adult Literacy Initiatives. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(1), 71–78.

GRA17 Teaching Resource - "The Wild Robot"

(Assignment #3)

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown is a phenomenal book for read-aloud and for cross-curricular activities. This title was one of the books selected to be a part of the 2017 Global Read Aloud and I am working collaboratively with the teachers of two grade 4/5 classes in my school in our debut year of the project. This project is exciting because it brings to the forefront the idea that our students are a part of a global community and making connections help to share different ideas and build understanding.

"Whereas in the past reading was predominantly an individual experience, it has become a more social event by using the digital resources that are readily available to readers. The access to others’ reading lives has created a space for sharing responses to texts on a global platform... Finding out what other readers read, think, and highlight is an important evolution in the reading lives of our students." (Serafini and Youngs, 2013)

In order to enhance the enjoyment of this book and to help the classroom teachers, I created a Padlet to showcase tools and resources to facilitate activities that we are working on together. This both serves as an overview and as a resource base for teachers to go to.

Students will have classroom and library time to work on activities throughout the six week read aloud. Materials are drawn from many sources and will allow for multimodal response to literature by the students. Students will need to access multiple literacies in order to complete tasks run by their classroom teacher and myself. Some examples include examining picture books, graphic novels, videos, or informational websites to compare or reflect on topics from The Wild Robot read-aloud. Meanwhile, weekly discussions and reflections will take place via moderated Padlet and Flipgrid forums.

Many of these activities will engage students in curricular goals across several subjects. The following is a listing from BC's New Curriculum and show how this project pertains to grades 4 and 5 learning goals:
Applied Design, Skills and Technology - Covering aspects of Defining, Ideating, Prototyping, Testing, Making and Sharing
Art - Explore connections to identity, place, culture, and belonging through creative expression
Language Arts - Exploring stories and other texts to help us understand ourselves and make connections to others and to the world
Mathematics - Developing and using multiple strategies to engage in problem solving
Physical and Health Education - Food choices to support active lifestyles and overall health; local and seasonal foods
Science - Experience and interpret the local environment; seeing how all living things sense and respond t their environment

In order to get teachers started, a selection of learning tools to enhance these projects were highlighted: Flipgrid, BreakoutEDU, and Padlet.

I met with the classroom teachers involved in this project as a group to introduce and go over set-up of the tools in order for them to familiarize themselves, ask questions and get any support they needed. I created the following information sheets to provide as a summary:

Documents can be accessed with this link.

I was lucky enough to have had interest by teachers across several grades this year for the Global Read Aloud and so projects similar to this have also been generated for three other groups: a Mem Fox author study (gr. 1/2), Fenway and Hattie by Victoria Cox (gr. 2/3) and A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park (gr. 5/6).

Feedback has been positive so far! Students have been thoroughly engaged with the activities and have been actively using the apps. I am confident that as other teachers in the school see this project in action, they will want to jump aboard as well.

On a side note, I mentioned this endeavour at a district TL meeting and have since had the opportunity to work with a colleague at a neighbouring school to facilitate bringing some of these tools into her library/school as well.

Work cited

Serafini, F., & Youngs, S. (2013). Reading workshop 2.0: Children's literature in the digital age. The Reading Teacher, 66(5), 401-404.