Authentic Audience

On Monday, I will be presenting to a small group of teachers about Authentic Audience and Genuine Connections. The process of preparing my presentation got me thinking about my sporadic blogging.

I have written posts on and off for my blog, but very seldom get comments on it. This is not a great mystery as I have not done as much as I could to publicize my blog. I sometimes tweet or post to google+ about a new post, but not in a consistent, energetic way. As such, I am not overly disappointed by the last of traffic.

So here is the question: does this lack of traffic mean that I do not have an authentic audience? I don't think that's true.  If I wrote in a paper journal that I kept tucked in my desk drawer, or even a digital journal kept safe on my hard drive, then I would not have an audience. I don't think that the important thing is the size of the audience, it is the potential for audience.

The fact that my posts are public and I have put them out there means that someone could read them and maybe even comment on them. I might contribute to someone else's thinking. Then again, I might not. As I write, I do not know which it will be. I will take the same care to ensure that I have written clearly and communicated my thoughts in a logical way for a potential audience as for an actual one because there is always possibility. My thinking and my writing must be better because it is more public than just for myself.

This translates very well to my classroom blogging. Students know that there is the possibility that classmates, or even people beyond the class could read what they have written. They step up their game because the potential for comments is there. Even if those comments only materialize occasionally, the potential is there. The authenticity of what they are doing, putting their work out there, is a great motivator for many of them.

This also applies to my presentation on Monday. The conference has lower attendance than expected and several sessions are being cancelled for low registration. Even though only a few people have signed up for my session, I intend to give it anyways. Those teachers are an authentic audience, if a small one. They are interested in what I have to say. I intend to put together a session that is every bit as good and perhaps better than I would have for a full house. They are my audience and I do not need large numbers for them to be a real audience. They deserve the best I can offer.

Show Your Talent

I am proud of my class today.

I just got home from the gala for the "Show Your Talent" contest for the Eastern Townships School Board. Several of my students performed live with the school Glee club. Overall, our school was very well represented.

My class submitted an anti-bullying video for the video-technology part of the competition. They cut two songs together and planned actions for the who thing. They taught the necessary actions to students in the other classes. We filmed it all on Pink Shirt Day on February 26th and edited it that afternoon. Here is the link to Be Brave, Be Stronger.

Our video certainly seemed polished compared to the others we saw. I am proud of my students for working together and pulling this off.

LCEEQ

I have just returned home from the annual LCEEQ conference in Laval. I was excited to have a chance to meet Alec Couros and Will Richardson in person. I have followed them on Twitter for years and it was nice to have a real-time conversation with each of them.

This year's theme revolved around social media. It really is mind-blowing that our students can literally Google anything they want to learn, from playing a musical instrument to solving a video game, and find a tutorial. I think a lot of teachers left the conference with a renewed commitment to teaching differently for the kids we have in front of us today.

Because of the theme, I decided to take a plunge. Normally, I would try to Tweet out a few interesting points, but would take the bulk of my notes in Evernote or Google Drive. The fact is, though, that I rarely, if  ever, return to those notes to read them.

So in the spirit of social media, I Tweeted. That's it. No doodles, not jot notes, no detailed notes, just Tweets. I can look back and see the pieces I found most worthy of sharing and I participated more fully because I wasn't trying to get all the notes down.

Hmmm...
Tweeting made me a better listener and participant. Wonder if that has classroom applications?

Fall Fare

Last week I was privileged to be able to attend Fall Fare. Fall Fare is a conference put on by ATEQ, the Association of Teachers of English of Quebec. While Springboards, ATEQ's flagship spring conference, is all about grassroots presenters from Quebec, Fall Fare is about bigger names, people you may have heard of before.

This year, Georgia Heard gave a keynote about using poetry throughout the year to teach students to fall in love with language and words. This reminded me of how rich poetry really is for language development. I try to d a poem a day, but it always seems to peter out by this point in the year. Since my students are largely french-mother-tongue, I need to seize every opportunity to inject vocabulary and rich language into out day. I need to get back on track with a poem a day, it is important.

Miriam Verberg gave a great talk about game design. She pointed out how much writing actually goes into video games. I wonder if some of my reluctant writers, especially the boys, would get excited about writing if it was the scenario for a video game. Couple that with one of the tools she showed that allows them to create a choose-your-own-adventure type story online, and we may have a winning recipe. Looking forward to giving it a try.

Who's Slow Now?

We were out and about again, so just a quick token to say that I didn't skip a day.

I saw a great quote today, and for the life of me, I cannot remember where.

• If you've told a child a thousands times and he still does not understand, then it is not the child who is the slow learner. Walter Barbee

 

Yup, I totally agree. How easy is it to repeatedly teach stuff the same way? It is something I have to constantly remind myself about. We have to use different learning styles, different language, and whatever other tools might help turn the light on for each student in our class. When we refer children to the resource teacher for testing, we should be sure that we have given them every opportunity to demonstrate what they are capable of. I am kind of glad that our new IEP process requires that, to open a new IEP, the teacher list all the interventions and assistance that have been tried. Try it a different way first.

Coordinated Decore Queries

I have been enjoying the extra time that I have available for browsing Pinterest. I find it quite relaxing to skim through and look for interesting ideas that I like. I pin lots of stuff in case I ever want to refer to it again, but really, it is the searching and the considering that I enjoy.

You see, I am not a particularly crafty person. My idea of a relaxing summer is not creating a new colour-coordinated theme for my classroom and applying it to everything I own. A project like this would leave me frustrated and saying foul words under my breath. Let's face it, the clutter in my room is going to bury all those pretty do-dads before the end of September anyways. 

I have been thinking, though, about how many teachers seem to (if you go by Pinterest), re-decorate along thematic lines each year. I am not just talking about a new welcome theme on the classroom door. These teachers go all-out! They do their hall passes, bulletin boards, curtains, seating, classroom rules, and more.

I wonder why these teachers do this. I don't think that a cute, coordinated classroom is inherently more welcoming than one with an eclectic array of items. Perhaps these are simply teachers who prefer to work in such an environment and who are doing it, at least in large part, for their own enjoyment. Maybe there is a section of some teacher evaluation rubric that includes whether the character on the worksheet matched the classroom theme for the year. I don't know.

As for myself, I think I will keep looking for and pinning ideas for math games and hands-on grammar activities. If I get really ambitious, I might even make one or two of them :)

Finding Summer

I have almost found summer, I can see it poking over the horizon!

I don't know about you, but it takes a few days or weeks after the school year ends each year before I can really unwind and enjoy summer.  At first, I find myself still thinking about the school year that has just ended, heading back to school to organize just one more thing, etc.. Also, the fact that for the first while, I need daily naps to recover from the exhausted state in which I finished the year

Then there is the organizing at home. Let's just say that I neglect the cleaning and tidying at home even more in June than the rest of the year. Once school ends, I must try to get on top of things. I try to motivate myself with the threat of having to spend the last weeks of summer in intensive cleaning mode - ick! I'd rather do it now.

But I can see summer peeking at me and I know it is not far away now. I am beginning to be able to consider cooking interesting meals for supper rather than the quick, stand-by meals that dominate the menu during the busiest times. A garage sale in two weeks offers hope for removing some of the unnecessary clutter in our house. I even looked at a teacher book beside my bed yesterday and almost felt ready to dive in.

Here's hoping summer will arrive next week. (Maybe it will even bring some sunny weather without so much rain! I like a rainy summer day spent reading as much as the next person, but it sure has been hard to keep the lawn mowed this year!)

I hope that you are finding your summer groove too.