Tuesday, August 31, 2010

December 14, 2009 - Ghosts of Canada Past and Twittering without Tweets

I can't believe there's just five days left until the winter holiday. My school is abuzz with concert preparation and their food drive in addition to the "regular learning" that goes on. The history unit that I helped the intermediate history teacher do as part of our Partners in Action co-planning/teaching/assessing has wrapped up. The task, including marking scheme and link to expectations, is attached to this blog. In all modesty, I must say I'm proud of what we accomplished in creating this task and impressed by what some of the students (not all) produced. (Yeah to JT, my fellow teacher, for trying this ambitious project.) (I think we needed to build in more conference time so that we avoided meeting groups who were still gathering information on key components of their project.) The task was to create an alternate history related to Confederation. It was meant to address differentiated instruction and involve creative thinking. This was not a "memorize all the dates" sort of project. I watched one production in which the students (two grade eight boys and one grade seven) used a green screen to turn one actor into a ghost that floated in the House of Commons to make its alternate history report. It was impressive.

This past Friday, I met with some impressive teacher-librarians that I admire a great deal to have a "mini-think tank" session. This was self-directed PD at its finest. We had fruitful discussions and at the end of the day, I finally decided to create myself a Twitter account. I don't want to tweet. I'll leave the Net-yakking to this blog. I want to use it to follow some fascinating minds in the school library world. My RSS feeds weren't working that well. I will put my Twitter on an iGoogle page and check it like I do my many email accounts. Thanks J and P and special gratitude to A for letting us crash her school library for an unscheduled tour that ended up as a 90 minute chat session.

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