Digital Learning Day is a yearly scheduled event to help focus on learning through different technology platforms. It is a great way to get students excited about using technology and to see the abilities that it has to enable their learning. Twitter was filled with amazing examples around the globe of educators using technology with …
If you haven’t participated in a twitter chat, it’s a must! I have done two this week and am starting to admit that I am becoming addicted. It is great to connect to other educators and hear about the amazing things that are happening in schools all around the world. On Monday, I participated in …
Lying in bed on a Saturday morning, attempting to sleep in but annoyed with my automatic body clock, I resorted to my phone and checked out what was happening on twitter. Before I knew it, I was immersed into a chat, nothing of which I had planned, and let me tell you, on an iphone …
Classrooms are filled with a variety of students with different abilities, background knowledge, languages, skill levels, and personalities. All of these factors effect and play an important role in students’ abilities to comprehend stories, information, or articles that they read. With our highly diverse student population, my school and teachers were finding that our students …
Did you know that “In any given year, one in five Canadians will experience a mental health problem or illness,” (Mental Health Commission of Canada, 2014). January 28, 2014 marks the fourth year of the Bell Let’s Talk campaign. It’s an opportunity to start a discussion around mental health issues, reduce the stigma associated with …
Every year sometime during term 2, my school has student-led conferences. It is a way for students to showcase their work and explain their learning to their parents. As a way to introduce this concept to the parents, I asked my students if they would like to create a movie trailer, using iMovie, to entice …
At my school we have an iPad cart, with a set of iPads that can move from class to class. This has proven to be a little challenging, and we had many hiccups along the way, but they finally seem to be up and running consistently. I brought them into my class yesterday, and as …
In my class, we are currently reading the short story, Koko’s Kitten. In case you are unfamiliar, it is about an incredibly talented, sign language-speaking gorilla and her unusual friendship with a kitten. My students absolutely loved this story and empathized in the sad moments with the gorilla, and rejoiced in the incredible friendship that …
“I don’t even understand why we have dictionaries. All you have to do is type a word into the internet and boom, you know what it means.” “I know, right? It’s so much easier. Any time I don’t know a word, I just type it into my app and it tells me.” “So true! I …
Checking my students’ agendas before they left for the day I came across a note in one that said, “Do homework first, watch t.v. after.” I asked the student if her dad had written the message as a reminder and she said no, that she had for herself. I questioned why and she replied that …
Out With Erin 