School is in session, Labor Day has passed and you know what that means. It's time to Pumpkin Spice every possible element of your life from candles to PopTarts. But your lessons? Oh yes, those too. First, some background. This past Summer I attended a career-changing week of professional development offered by my district. Our energetic presenters kept us engaged every minute trying to absorb tool after tool that would make teaching more fun, effective and efficient. It was like being on Oprah every day. "You get a HyperDoc and you get a YouTube Channel and you get a Chrome Extension!" In the end, I came away with more value than I could have guessed and best of all a new spark of excitement for the coming year. My mind has been buzzing ever since with ideas for how to make my classroom support my students physically, emotionally, and intellectually. One of my favorite resources from that training is the SAMR model. A poster on the wall illustrated how our technology infused lessons can reach new depths, but also emphasized that lessons of all depths are valuable. As I contemplated the depth of my lessons and and sipped my coffee I stumbled upon this: An image created by Jonathan Brubaker (@mia_sarx), based on the writing of Tim Holt. Finally! Something I can deeply relate to! I am a lover of coffee and all coffees are valuable to me. I know I can't drink a beloved PSL every day, it would lose its power. But I can't just stick to my soy latte all the time either, sometimes I need more and my students do too. When it comes to my lessons, I am very comfortable in the Augmentation band, but I do wander into Modification occasionally. Redefinition tends to be a rare treat, but truly a treat. This year I'm going to aim for a little more balance and I'm going to treat myself to a Pumpkin Spice Lesson a little more often. Just like the Pumpkin Spice Latte breathed new life into Fall coffee, Redefinition will breathe new life into my classroom. I can already see my students coming alive with excitement at 8am, desperate for their first sip of the lesson. It's a big promise to make, but I have a competitive nature so let's make this happen! We are currently designing waterslides in my STEAM elective. As a class the challenge is right in their zone of proximal development: difficult, but manageable with support from others. Now, how can we use technology to redesign an engineering challenge? We could Skype with waterslide designers to get feedback on our designs and then create an eHow for waterslide design. We could create advertising videos to sell our slides and ask marketing professionals to give us tips and then re-edit them and share them within our school or beyond. We could even use TinkerCad to design our slides in 3D and print the models for further testing, ultimately creating blueprints for a life-size version. I don't know yet what direction this project will go in, but I do know that in order to really inspire the excitement of a Pumpkin Spice Lesson it cannot stay inside our classroom. We will reach out, we will make contact, we will find meaning and we will, absolutely, go Grande. Special thanks to the always inspiring Lindsay Blass (@LindsayBlass1), Heather Haggerty (@HeatherHaggerty), Matt Vaudrey (@MrVaudrey), Lisa Highfill (@LHighFill), Matt Miller (@jmattmiller) and Jon Corippo (@joncorippo).
0 Comments
|
Sherry BurchWriting about teaching, teaching about science, technology and life. ArchivesCategories |