A New Project

A New Project

 I lie awake at night and wonder why I push myself to do so much.  I get these ideas and I devote time to them and each idea  and project means there is less of me to go around, but it is such challenge and I enjoy exploring these personal challenges. We'll see how long they last, but it gives me great pleasure to at least try. So I got it into my head that with our grandchildren already in the primary grades, I ought to try and read to them, or rather, I would like to read to them. So I thought about it and while I am already reading picture books and posting them in our WhatsApp group listing, I wanted to do something more. So I decided to podcast. Here was a new skill and one that seems to be very popular right now.  I did research and just picked one podcasting host, Google, although I expect our daughter will suggest I try other sites too. It seems that you can get more than one site to host.  We'll see how that evolves.   Once I decided to use a particular host and get an RSS feed, then I needed to figure out which software to use for recording. I tried several actually, from looking at several different lists. One I chose, which I thought was free, clearly indicated I was on a 14 day trial and so I didn't want to use that.  Then I went with Audacity, which is software I had used before, when taping all my vinyl record albums and encoding them into Digital tracks.  That went much, much better until realized that I needed to convert from AUD files to MP3 files. Another search and I spent time during one night thinking that one through.  But all is good to go now and I've landed on doing a podcast of me reading to my grandchildren old enough to enjoy chapter books. There were over a dozen books to choose from but I settled on one and after today's work, I am on a roll.  I like to think the technical issues are overcome.  For now.  However, I need to work at advocating for my podcasts and my blogs and my book stuff.  After I get my second printing underway and my paperback available on Amazon, I'm going to make a serious effort to get my website up and running. I've had to promise myself I would not try to cover all my bases for the next couple of weeks.  I'm not going to do any ore videos, this is the last blog posting , and I"ve done all the oral reading, save the podcasting, till after the New Year. I look forward to really pushing my online presence over the next couple of weeks.  I might have taken on too much, but I also can, at least, see an end to the tunnel.

Focus on Relationships

Focus on Relationships

When I was teaching in the College of Education for Niagara University in Toronto, I used to tell my students that, in many ways, teachers are like the pied piper.  We lead the way and our students follow us if we are doing our job properly.  Often my students would refer to me as a great teacher and I would remind them that it takes good students to make a good teacher. In many ways, those are two ways of looking at the crucial relationship between each teacher and student. I was reminded of this today while reading the notes from SmartBrief from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. These are compendia that I get daily into my Inbox about items of interest to teachers and administrators. I actually get three different lists but there are always items of interest in one or the other of the briefs that I get. Today, there were actually two.  One of them referred to an article written in a blog by a principal from a school in Washington State. The other was commenting on a study conducted by teachers of Special Education when surveyed about their work online given the needs of the pandemic. In the latter, the study reported that teacher confirmed that it was important to understand the family environment because the teacher is actually a guest in the home of his or her students and cultural expectations and awareness are crucial.  As an example, I remember vividly when I went as a teenager to stay with a family in New York City that my parents had met and who had a teenaged girl my age.  They asked me we lived in igloos in the winter time. These were people living in Brooklyn, NY in the early '60s.  What did they know about Canada, but I knew that the comment was ignorant. If I had been a student, my relationship with that adult would never have been the same.  I would not have been likely to follow that leader.  In the former, it is self-evident to many that if we don't have relationships with our students, how can we help them when they are having trouble.  Students are individuals and even more today, we know that acquiring knowledge, mastering skills and adopting values that we attempt to pass on will none of them happen if we don't know our students as individuals.   How can we reach out to them? How can we help them if we don't know where their pitfalls are or what makes them tick as humans.  Similarly, online it is even more important to use strategies that will shed light on the student behind the camera or the text posted online. I used to encourage my students to write a paragraph about themselves as a way of introduction, asking them to tell me and their fellow students what they think we should know about them. Students in general are very open.  We need to capitalize on that openness right away to sense who they are and how we can find that hook that will enable us to play the pied piper, to lead them in the direction we want them to go. Pronounce their names the right way, purposefully, as a show of respect.  Ask them what they want you to call them, whether a formal name or a nickname and so forth.  Whatever you do, you should look for things on a regular basis that helps you to check in with them, and to watch them carefully enough so you recognize the signs of boredom, happiness, frustration, sadness and so forth.  Whatever you do, try to KNOW them and respond to that knowledge all the time.  It makes you focus on the relationships. 

Creating Anything Has to be Part of Any Program

Creating Anything Has to be Part of Any Program

Almost every day, there is an article in the printed press or a video item in the broadcast press expressing dissatisfaction with online learning. While almost 60 % of parents support continuing some form of online learning beyond the end of the. pandemic, there is not much understanding of how online learning occurs. Whether students are in front of a classroom teacher in a real classroom or in front of a screen at home, the one thing that has to take place in both cases is a challenge to students to be creative, to create.  It is a misconception to believe that that cannot happen online.  It is all about promoting problem solving of one kind or another and then challenging students to be creative in the way in which they communicate their ideas and thoughts.  Probably it doesn't really matter what students are creating as long as they are.  When I was in the classroom, I always did a novel studies with my students, but not in the traditional sense. Several years running, my entire reading program was comprised of a compulsory one book a month read with choices of follow up activities to demonstrate what the reader had gotten out of the book that they read.  They could not, my students, use the same challenge twice. So, for instance, they could only do one book cover, which they INVENTED not copied of the book they read and the cover had to indicate something about the book they had read and they had to be able to explain that to me.  They were encouraged to create plays or write poetry or do three dimensional dioramas or bulletin boards or newspaper articles or the traditional book review for a children's magazine and so forth.  These activities involved choice by the students so they had to decide what they were going to do.  Then they had their choices of materials, subject matter, media, done singly or with partners.  When my students reflect on what they liked about my classrooms, it is always the chance to be creative and to invent. Why is this so important though, you might ask. Well, if you can name me one invention that is now part of our daily lives or was and has been overtaken by something else,  you will be hard pressed to figure out how it came to be without someone seeing an opportunity to create something. There was an article just today about a young athlete who had become partially paralyzed through a sporting accident and now he is inventing ways for disabled people to get around and not just travel from place to place but to play as well.  Every invention begins with someone with enough confidence to think of something new that didn't exist before.  That's why creativity is so important in the classroom. Unless we empower our students to think out of the box and make up things, they will become stifled and lose that creativity.  It is like priming the pump to extract water.  It has to be primed and pumped before the water flows evenly.  Creating has to be part of any program, it has to be key to an individualized learning journey.