Written by Last saturday marked the beginning of an exciting adventure for me, as we began Cohort 21. The day was filled with great tips and tricks and meeting some influential and incredibly talented educators from CIS. I really enjoyed the flow and how open and receptive everyone was to good discussion on teaching and learning. I found that the day brought forth some much needed inspiration from me in terms of new perspectives and new ways of interaction with technology.
I have been tweeting rapidly since Saturday about all things education and some very useful articles that would benefit from. I have created a separate twitter account for my classes and will be working on experimenting with it for extra help in the next units for my computer science and math courses at my school. I think that its very powerful and can be useful for a wide range of purposes. I hope to explore this now!!!
I think that cohort 21 will help me bring the risk-taking back an aspect that I fear may have been left somewhat in the dust as the years progressed. I want to be a connected, innovative and inspired and have already took the bull by the horns in some of my other classes. Today I had my students complete a Check for Understanding activity that emphasizes the material we have covered in the ICS4U course over the past week. The students filled out the forms and I will be using Flubaroo to mark them and give them some useful feedback.
I am ready to take risks, looking forward to becoming inspired. I feel that blogging about these experiences is a great tool that can be used to help me gain critical insight into the true potential that us teachers have!! More posts to come!!!
Hi Kyle,
Congrats on the quick uptake of getting that risk back into your teaching. You’ve picked up an important theme, and one that is shared by Melissa Ramone from SAC: http://cohort21.com/melissaramon/2014/10/21/frost-on-the-brain-in-october/
It’s about getting that healthy risk-taking back in our teaching that helps us see the curriculum through the students’ eyes, and make our classrooms geared more directly to student engagement and ultimately, student learning success!
Great first post, and I look forward to more from your experimenting,
garth.
Hi Kyle
Talk to Lee Hamr about tweeting in classes – she did an action research project about this a few years ago and is a good resource person.
Seonaid
Kyle,
It’s awesome to read about how excited you are to take some new and exiting risks – how lucky are your students to get to learn from such excellent modelling?
It would be awesome to reach out to Bart VanVeghel from last year’s cohort group: he was experimenting with using Twitter in his Grade 2 class.
You can follow him @bartvanveghel
Hi Kyle,
Glad to hear that you’re diving in head first with Twitter in the classroom! I’d love to hear more about how you find the students pick up on using the Twitter account for extra help. One of my colleagues uses a Twitter account to engage his students in politics (@GCSPOLS), but I haven’t heard of any math teachers jumping into the Twittosphere.
However, if you’re looking for some good math-y Twitter peeps, check out the #mathchat that happens every Monday at 3:30pm. You can find a calendar of other Twitter chats here: https://www.google.com/calendar/[email protected]
I look forward to meeting you in person, until then, I’ll see you on Twitter!
Leslie
Hey Kyle,
I agree that writing a blog is a great way to get at understanding what it is you’re examining. If Cohort is anything, we hope it’s inspiring and I’m excited that you’ve found the motivation to take more measured risks in your teaching.
Twitter is an amazing tool, and I hope you’ll participate in some of our monthly twitter chats – last Wednesday of every month at 9pm – look for #cohort21!
I am very curious to hear how Twitter is working for you with respect to the extra help! Perhaps it merits a post? At any rate, I’ll be sure to check in at the next F2F if I haven’t seen anything by then. Good luck and risk wisely.