CNE Twice in a Week

 Last week, I was at the CNE twice. Once was on Tuesday (April 25) for the TDSB Unleashing Learning conference [technically at the Beanfield Centre] and the other time was on Thursday (April 27) for the Spring GTA Resource Fair [technically at the Queen Elizabeth Building]. Being away from the school building twice in a single week isn't always a good thing, but it was worthwhile. 

Unleashing Learning 2023 (#tdsbUL23)

I drove down to the Beanfield Centre, which was probably a mistake, because it took 90 minutes to get there and over 2 hours to get home. Thankfully, I made it in time to hear the opening keynote, from TDSB Director Colleen Russell Rawlins.

I like our director. I knew her when she was a superintendent. She toured our school and was attentive during that visit. I sent her a hand-sewn fidget maze with a short note a few years back. (To my chagrin, I realized after the fact that I had misspelled the word fidget.) 

Colleen's talk was solid. It was impressive how she invited all present trustees and executive central staff on stage and proceeded to thank them all by name by sight. There were several things I liked about her speech, such as mentioning AI (which was the subject of my #tdsbUL23 presentation), appearing to understand the limitations of gamification (which I contend is inferior to actual games based learning), and highlighting the importance of building our emotional vocabulary.

After Colleen's talk was the first session. I gave a session called "Exploring Algorithms with Primary Students: Magic, Mystery, and More!". It was similar to the talk I gave at the Global Media Education Summit called "Fostering Primary Division Students' Critical Exploration of Algorithms". Unfortunately, the technology was not very cooperative. The HDMI cord wouldn't fit into my school laptop. The extra HDMI cord I brought wouldn't fit either. Agnieszka Kopka lent me her extra laptop, which did fit the cord, but wouldn't allow me to log in. I considered emailing a copy of my slides to her email so I could show them, but my session was only 20 minutes long. It wasn't worth struggling any longer. Thankfully, I printed hard copies of my lesson plans and used Agnieszka's computer to show the websites that I referenced as part of my lesson plans. 10 people attended my talk. (I know this because I collected emails so I could send them my slide deck afterwards.)

The rest of Session 1 was filled with visiting the DLL Marketplace and reconnecting with some wonderful colleagues

Here's Jennifer Cadavez showing people her work on using and annotating photos.

Here's Ashley Clarke demonstrating the integration of loose parts and tech.

3 fantastic TLs: Mira Campbell, April deMelo & Larissa Aradj

Me and Ken Jinkinson

Let me tell a quick story about the amazing Ken. Long, long ago, I attended a workshop with my friend Renee, led by Ken. Ken may not be OCT-certified, but he taught me so much that day about instructional management strategies related to technology that I've been a fan of his ever since. Renee was lucky enough to work with him directly for a few years when she was in the Assistive Technology Department. Any time I see him, it's a day-maker.

After a delicious lunch with Michelle and Nadine (and kudos to Peter Singh for directing traffic to the buffet stations with calm efficiency!), I attended Session 2. My choice for this was Linette Ballantyne's talk on Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's Five Pursuits. I've read both Cultivating Genius and Unearthing Joy by Dr. Muhammad, but I still need tips on how to incorporate the five pursuits more explicitly in my plans. Linette had soca playing as people entered the room. In her talk, Linette highlighted some key understandings of Muhammad's work. The use of the word pursuits (as opposed to the Eurocentric term "standards") is deliberate and based on the goals of 1800s Black literary society goals. Intellectualism is action-oriented. Criticality is linked to the idea that we have authority on a topic when we can critique it and have an understanding of marginalization. Linette gave many examples of how to develop those pursuits. She mentioned that an educator she was co-planning with wanted to focus on kente cloth as part of a unit on 2D shapes, but wasn't sure where the criticality was. Ballantyne prompted thinking on where people are able to buy things that represent who they are, and helped students search online mall directories for kente cloth; students realized quickly that many of the "major" malls did not offer this. The question (which made my media literacy heart happy) was "What do you notice? What do you wonder?" I will have to check out www.thetruesize.com to explore how maps make some places more or less prominent based on size (for as a student of Linette's remarked, "When you have size, you have power".) Another website to view in the future is Forebears, which examines the popularity of names. Linette's sample lessons are on the TDSB English Language and Literacy site. 

Session 3's offering was called "Tinkering with the New Science Curriculum" by Mahfuza Rahman and Stephen Gilbert. They have tons of slide decks created to help with many resources linked in the TDSB Virtual Library and on their board site, such as TVOLearn, Women in STEM posters, Microsoft Hacking STEM, the Skills Ontario Junk Drawer races, the STEM Equity Conference 2021 sessions, and more. In classic STEM action, the audience had a chance to use the Engineering Design process to build and tweak a Rotocopter. I took a photo of mine (along with my cute new shoes, which unfortunately [Kim Davidson, take note] gave me horrendous blisters!).

The closing keynote was Takara Small. Only about 1/3 of the initial crowd remained and if I'm being honest, the only things I can recall involved her explanation of the Shirley Card, ways people were photographed, and that it took chocolate and furniture companies complaining about how their product (not their people) appeared in ads that led to changes.

I saw this tweet and the justifiable concern about the whitewashing AI does, and it reminded me of Takara's talk. (If you didn't notice, the child's drawing is of a brown hand, and the AI turned it into a white person's hand.)

I have discovered that young children are fascinated by the process of turning their drawings into photorealistic AI art.

They'll then occupy themselves voluntarily drawing more. I bet this will soon be used in art classes to introduce them to generative AI. pic.twitter.com/CCbUt5oOCk

— OnPageLeads AI 🎯 (@OnPageLeads) April 30, 2023

Spring 2023 GTA Resource Fair

Why are we going again? As this blog shows, I just took students to the Fall 2022 GTA Resource Fair. Why did we return? There are several good reasons.

1) We still had budget money to spend.

2) It's the best way to see many TDSB vendors in a single location and touch the books we want to buy.

3) My Library Helper President made it so.

Let me explain. The Library Helper Club elects a president every year. The president is in charge of maintaining and checking the schedule to see that other library helpers are attending and working. He/she/they monitor how the library operates for students and makes suggestions. This year, my Library Helper president had two major suggestions regarding the major perk offered to library helpers - the perk being the GTA Resource Fair trip. In the past, I only took enough students to fit in my car. Her first suggestion was to reward everyone who had not been fired the year they worked. The only way to make that possible was by taking the GO Train (which was faster than my solo drive in my car, but longer because we walked from school to the GO Station). Her second suggestion was to have Tippett ship the boxes of books to our school instead of carrying them back with us. How can you turn down a reasonable request like that? My son even accompanied us this time as a supervisor, and it was nice to have him along, even though he was "peopled out" by the end.

 Stay tuned for next week's report on the TDSB Heritage Fair, which isn't at the CNE Grounds but still downtown.