When students become passionate about History!

How will we ensure that learning goes beyond the classroom?

How do we ensure students get engaged in history?

How  do we ensure that the learning is rich and deep enough that every students finds passion of learning?

Strong provocations hook students to passionate learning and critical thinking. Capturing students passion through experiences that leads to interactions, questioning and discussions of historical events. We began our historical analyzation by Exploring the The Giant Floor Map of 1812 from The Canadian National Geographic.  In a previous post on unpacking what is history and Geography? Since early October up to now students are still referring to their experiences of the War of 182 and are familiar with the concept of events and timelines. Building knowledge of the first inhabitants in Canada and how they have arrived and adapted to the arrival of the Europeens.  From a living library with aboriginal artifacts to the Blanket exercise with my English partner Ms Brambles. Visiting the virtual museum and building individual passion by exploring aboriginal peoples needs. Now we are immersed in the learning of WWI through WW1 Kit form the War Museum. Students have gone home and independently continued searching and sharing their excitement about history through building of lego. iMovies, Powtoon, Google presentations. Students are excited about reading and synthesizing the historical aspects, causes, effects and perspectives. Students are applying their historical knowledge through conversations with respect to the facts from long ago that shaped our lives today.

The passion for learning is stretching students thinking and learning by slowing down to allow them ownership of explorations, discussions. Passion for learning is living the moment for quality rather than quantity of learning,  allowing the curiosity to flow and build a learning community of new concepts through many provocations and thinking skills.

Connected Educators!

Last weekend I was privileged to attend the Ottawa GAFE summit.  It was an honor to meet with colleagues whom I already connect and learn with as well as meeting Canadian and international educators whom enhanced my technological skills and confirmed classroom learning process.

I recommend Kern Kelley, Jim Sill and Monica Martinez for international presenter on technology.  I attended Julie Millan's session on For, As, Of Learning: Using Google Apps to Integrate Assessment Practices to which I connected to her presentation and gave me the boost and excitement of confirming what I practice in class with my students before my presentation on  How GAPPS Support Thinking and Transparency of learning joined by Cathryn Wake for English Junior and Primary samples.

The reason I choose to only add links to my whole presentation is because I believe to only speak to real evidence of students' thinking. Most of the process that I spoke to, I have been developing for three years now and that I continue to enhance with my students and find a purpose for empowering students' reflection and giving them a chance to speak to their learning process and their thinking.

I also spoke to the" seeing and hearing" of the students' voice when collecting evidence of learning with students for their parents. I had a Google doc during the presentations that had links from the past years to the present showing 'the how' and 'the what' of students' voice and empowering growth through digital portfolios.

Thanks to Cathryn Wake for joining in and showing her application from last years' Grade four students and tempting Google with the Gr 1's. Thanks to Natalie MacDonald for sharing all of the Grade one digitable collaboration with Jennifer Flinn. Thanks also to all who attended and their feedback. Thanks to Jennifer King for staying after her presentation and her feedback while presenting.

I would also like to thank Karen McEvoy for inviting me to be part of Learning Connections and evolving through the years with the skills of learning and being a connected educator by sharing, exploring and reflecting with colleagues on my learning process through technology from my students.

On my twitter connection today I came across this tweet by Tom Whitby.It is true that as educators we need to have a mindset of learning, collaborating, reflecting to become a conceptual teacher focusing on the process of learning than the product of learning and using technology when appropriate for teaching and learning.

Connectedness for an educator must be a mindset for learning. w/o it, Tech is just a bunch of bells and whistles. @LynneOakvik #Edchat #ce14
— Tom Whitby (@tomwhitby) October 10, 2014