ECMP 355 Mentorship Experience
This is a bit of a race for the finish line blog post – my brain is about sixty places in the days since we had our last class!
The mentorship experiences I undertook in this class was extremely beneficial to me, as both teacher and student. It really helped me to challenge myself to become familiar and investigate many new web 2.0 tools we discussed in class.
Mentorship with Ms. Nestico
I dove headfirst into my partnership with Susie Nestico’s Grade 12 class and their Problems of Democracy wiki immediately! Time was extremely short, the students were wrapping up their class assignments by the third week of May, and I was very apprehensive about diving in so fast since we were just beginning to cover the many tools and technologies available for educators!. My learning curve with this class was extremely fast! In the span of about 48 hours, I had invited myself to the 2nd period class’ interest group wikis, studied the rubrics for the course and assignment, took a quick tutorial of Glogster to understand how it works, read and examined seven wiki spaces, and worked until the wee hours of the morning gathering links to websites I could paste into my comments that may expand the students learning, or show them a differning perspective.
I blogged in more detail about this experience previously, click the link if you’d like to read my musings and the quandary I experienced while working with this class.
Time was very short – and I really wished I could have done more in terms of interacting with students and getting some of their opinions on the projects they created.
Ms. Nestico was also involved in a really amazing online project called The Flat Classroom Project – this was an online classroom project that linked several (I think maybe 12 or 13) classrooms across the globe in a Ning space, with a focus on educating themselves and others on responsible digital citizenship. This was a really amazing project, and again I wish I’d had more time to follow along and comment on the work students were doing here. Ms. Nestico’s class was just wrapping production on a video they had made about Cyberbullying, and sadly I only got the chance to watch the video they had made, which brought to light some of the differences between the bullying of the past, and the damages of cyberbullying. I merely scratched the surface of this project, and I am curious to know a lot more about how The Flat Classroom Project came about, and whether or not this is an ongoing project that teachers can join from year to year. What a beneficial experience for students! They were interacting and trading information with classrooms in so many different countries!
My head was spinning by the time I finished looking at all of the amazing ways Susie was using technology in her classroom! It was very early on in the course, and I was still very intimidated by all of the things I had yet to learn. Yet in retrospect, I think this was a great staring point for me – as 80% observer, and 20% contributor.
Mentoship with Eldon German
My experience with Eldon and his class was very brief experience for me. This is not at all the fault of Eldon – I dropped the ball in the milieu of trying to keep up with class work, my day job, rehearsing for a jazz gig, and my mistress on 8 wheels, Derby. One of Eldon’s classes has been working on blogging about a variety of web 2.0 tools. Many students had researched their web tool, and provided links to tutorials, or had included short tutorials on their blogs about Google Docs, Google Maps, YouTube, and others. I spent a little time reading one student’s blog about YouTube. Sadly, this is where my interaction with the class stopped.
I did get a lot out of reading the classes different blog posts – I shared the link to the Multiple Intelligences Test that the class had done, and I learned a lot about YouTube from just one student’s blog post about it.
Mentorship with Jared Nichol
I won’t lie – I got HUGE benefits from this mentoring partnership with Jared and his ELA 9 class. I am a Literature minor, and I really got excited about the ideas Jared had about putting such a fresh spin on the marriage of technology literature!
I was much less apprehensive about working with new web tools when I started to work with Jared’s class. They had a class wiki, a class blog, they used Glogster, Voicethread, and worked in partnership with Bert and I on the creation of our final project using Google Forms and YouTube.
I had my successes and my failures while working with all of these web tools. Glogster was a big challenge for me (I’m not very visual, and I was trying to create Glog pages that could contribute my own tastes and influences in poetry to share with the students), and I spent some time putting it together only to abandon it out of frustration and lack of time! Voicethread was by far the easiest tool to use – though I found my frustration level with new web tools decreased as the class moved on, and as I spent more time working with them.
I really loved the interaction I had with this class! Jared was really open to ideas and collaboration, and I loved reading the students blog responses to the poems and ideas we all shared together. I put a lot of my time and effort into this class because of the subject matter, and because I knew it would be very, very valuable to me.
The Final Word – I Promise!
It was impossible to take nothing away from each of these experiences, and when I think back on it, each teacher who opened up their classroom to myself and others contributed heaps and heaps to my learning in this class. It is one thing to try out new tools just for fun – it’s a whole other experience to observe and use web tools in partnership with curriuculum. Seeing these tools in action in the classroom provided me with endless ideas and inspirations for how I could potentially use them in my future classroom, and I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED how the class blogs, glogs, voicethreads and wikis provided students with a place to make their mark, voice their opinions and concerns, and discuss their learning.
I learned so much about how technology in the classroom helps students and teachers to share information!
Thank you to my partnering teachers! You deserve a hand!
It was extremely generous and brave of all of our partner teachers to open up their classrooms to us!
