Awakening Possibilites

This Thursday everyone needs to attend in person or virtually Awakening Possibilities. It is a chance to see:



This even follows the very successful Edubloggercon from last year. We hope to see many people out this year.

The presenters will follow Chris Lehmann's 5 minute, 20 slide 15 seconds per slide style of presentation. It will be interesting to see the presentations and what everyone has to say. I am looking forward to the virtual audience and the F2F audience. I hope that if you live in Winnipeg or are coming into town for SAG that you take advantage of the wealth of knowledge that will be presenting on Thursday evening.

The new RRCC campus on Princess is worth the price of admission alone. It is a marvel of architecture and a beautiful place to hang out and network. So bring your laptop and join the online and F2F crowd as we Awaken Possibilities.

What is next..

New assignment for the wee lads and lasses of Sargent Park Math. I am going to get them to create a....


no wait that was in Norwegian. I will try that again



They have been doing some extensive integer training to prepare them for algebra. With this in mind they will create a GREAT BIG BOOK OF EVERYTHING that they know about Algebra. It will start out with the integers and lead into the concepts being taught before Christmas break.

Students will have to create 5 different types of poems to add to their book. I appreciated their integer stories so I am going to continue with this cross curricular side trip that I am taking. They will be free to express their knowledge in as may ways as possible.

I am also setting a few choice but keen students on an side trip to attempt to make a video like this.



Think about all the possibilities one could have with the common mistakes students have in math. Going to be a great 4 weeks. Grab on the speed is increasing.

I have great students

It has been a fun and fast filled first term at Sargent Park. The students are really taking to the blog and now it is time to turn up the heat. I was amazed at first seeing the amount of page views the class blogs were getting. It is already the third month and some classes are experiencing over 5000 page views. The students also seem to be tuning into the sargentparkmathzone to see the days lesson from ustream.

The best part of the year is the commenting that students are doing. My email is flooded every night with comments left behind from students. I appreciate all the work that they are doing. The comments started off light and fluffy. Good Job :-) but now they are more appropriate and give the students a sense of audience.


With this frenzy of activity around the blog my team members are getting interested in starting projects of their own. First steps being shown by many people in the building gives me hope for a future.

Love my job!! Now I am going to turn up the heat on these students and set them loose on a new adventure. Stay tuned.....

How open are you

My good friend Darren Kuropatwa who got me blogging in the first place introduced me to the power of the smartboard. He would create these great lessons and then upload them to slideshare. This was a great way to use the technology in the class to keep the doors open 24 hours a day. Here the students could see what happened in class. Darren also experimented with digitally recording his voice and podcasting each class. This was alot of work. Enter Camtwist and Ustream.

816 Mult Int Part 1

View SlideShare document or Upload your own. (tags: spmath multiplying)

Last year I tried to broadcast my lessons on ustream using camtwist to capture the desktop aka the smartboard and my voice (no kids faces on tv... nice for the censors). My mac mini only had half a meg of ram and the smartboard and the ustream were constantly competing or the small amount of ram that I had. The experiment was finished when they removed my smartboard last year to be used in a different class.
Live Streaming by Ustream.TV
This year I got my smartboard back and some more ram for the mac mini. Everything is going smoothly now and a weeks worth of lessons are archieved at ustream. This is an easy way to keep your lessons and for student to access work when they are not at school. I am loving this. You might want to try it too.

The Peace Quilt

A few weeks ago some teachers at my school asked me to help them create a project. They wanted to publish some artwork online and make a quilt. This sounded great. First of all they wanted help and second of all those baby steps were being taken. I created a wiki and showed the teacher how to create pages and work within the wiki. I also showed the teachers flickr. I am so excited to see other professionals in my building start down this path. It has been a long 4 years but finally something is happening.


The Peace Quilt. The idea was spawned around the topic of Remembrance Day. This is the eleventh day of the eleventh month. WW I was ended on this day and it is a national day of Remembrance in Canada. The grade 4 teacher got their student to draw pictures about remembrance, war, veterans and peace.

Together the students and teachers uploaded their pictures to flickr. Here they made sure that they had the appropriate tags and titles. The teachers were very excited. To make the mosaic or quilt I used FD Flickr toys mosaic maker.
All of these ideas were floating around when When Night Falls was taking place. In the lulls of conversation I happened to mention to the other participants and low and behold a little project became a large global collaborative project. I was blessed to have participants for Australia, and the US wanting to participate. I also had other classes across Canada participating.

A full list of participants can be found at The Peace Quilt and more are still completing their pictures. The goal of this project was to have students connect with one another and communicate about peace. I also needed the teachers in my building to take first steps and become literate with the tools an applications that my network is so familiar with. Both are occurring.


As the project continues the students will leave flickr notes on other students work, leave comments behind at the wiki and at flickr and keep the conversation alive. This was my first attempt at being a collaborative project coordinator. I suppose I have done alright. It has been fun and I want to thank my network and those that made the project great.



The quilts will continue to be built this week. There are still more images out there needing to be sewn into this collaborative project.

Man I love this stuff.

Google Video Chat

Just tried out http://mail.google.com/videochat. It was a blast. Easy to do and good quality. You have a full screen option that is different than skype. The quality of the video tonight as also quite good. Wonder were this leaves the whole collaboration piece. This is a powerful tool.

A couple of hiccups tonight. Some people did not get the video and audio feed properly. When they switched over to Safari on their Mac's then the system worked properly. Hope you have success and hey Call me I have a camera in the school. Look forward to talking to you in the future.

Lookybook

This is so cool. Lookybook is a site to see free picture books. Sort of a Last.Fm of the picture book market.