Making is a Thinking Process!

 I continue learning with my students by applying designing thinking strategies and the thinking process of the 6 Cs . We keep on evolving with the process where the students become the specialists as they apply and reflect on their thinking progressions. As we unfold the process through designing and making, the students embrace the development of skills and perseverance along their daily explorations.

Students are experiencing multiple steps during their learning from digital tools to collaboration with each other and the community while exploring design elements and habits of learning.

From a previous post  on integrative thinking using open ended conversations, integrative thinking models for valuing of ideas, combining designs and interpersonal skills for knowledge building on the concepts of electricity.

Following up on the process of thinking skills from the last blog post; the students were able to use technology to capture the thinking process of iterating from visualizing their combined ideas to the prototypes of the cardboard games.  

This video represents the revision history of the students' design and iteration of ideas while producing the prototype. The students used google drawing to update the drawing while constructing the cardboard game. I asked a couple of students to produce an English version of their process since all of their learning is in French. 

Students also explained the materials used during the process.

From the Kevin Brookhouser presentation at Ottawa GAFEsummit we applied the life of a project into our version and students reflected on the life of their project that required iteration and problem solving skills along the way.

This is the bilingual students language version of a life of a project. 

The evidence of a life of a project when designing and reflecting on the prototype.

Throughout the process students also reflected on their progressions of collaborative, character and  creative thinking skills. 

Making is so much more than the space it is:

• About the engagement phases and capturing the learning journey. 
• Building students' skills on collaboration, Character, Communication and Creativity. 
• A journey focusing on problem solving, metacognition by reflecting throughout the process on  skill building.  
• It is knowledge building of new concepts that are valued among the classroom and school community. 
• Generating ideas about the experiences, sharing them and synthesizing.
• It is about the thinking and rethinking during the process at every step. 
• It is student centered focusing on questioning, iterating when inventing and making. 
• When students are immersed in risk taking with perseverance and problem solving at every step by improving and changing ideas along the journey. 
• It is about building a community of seeking feedback and giving feedback.
• It is a journey of problem solving and creating with a collaborative mindset for innovation.

Making  is about embracing the process where students love their learning and discover the relationship of the thinking concepts of science, technology, engineering, math and the arts. It also is more than STEAM, it is about building partnership of collaborative thinking skills and motivation for learning.

I continue to reflect on:
What skills and concepts are the students acquiring, experiencing and reflecting on during their learning journey?
Are the students leading their learning through problem solving, reflecting on the process and sharing collectively their learning?
Are the students focusing beyond the content on citizenship, creativity and interdependence?
Are students aware of their own criteria through thinking habits?

Taking Risks Without Hesitation!

This post is a combination of unpublished posts regarding teacher and student relationship of unplanned learning. This post combines a learning journey for me as a teacher and as a learner with my students discovering so much more than just learning skills, it is building real life skills experiences for us together as creators and learners.

The first reflection is about the social entrepreneurship that we embarked on this year with the Grade 5 and 6 students.  This entrepreneurship program through The Learning Partnership Adventure has  been and still is a learning journey for me and my teaching partner Carolyn Brambles and our business  BMO partner Gordon Mills.

Since the last post Student Lead Innovations  students' experiences persevere from failing to moving forward, from  progressing to regressing with acceptance and pride. The engagement among teams goes beyond tears, laughter, disappointments, reorganisation, commitments, readjustments, ideas, creativity, making, recruitments, marketing and accounting experiences.

Once a week the Grade 5 and Grade 5/6 students gather as a large group to reflect on the progression of the enterprise and determining next steps. Sometimes students choose  to meet at recess to work on their products. The students' experiences have been very rewarding  in discovering unplanned rich experiences bubbling with problem solving, conversations, thinking, decision making, reflections and planning next steps. What an experience! It lead students to bond their creative ideas and to come up with innovations from the designing to the production, ordering, purchasing, the marketing and best of all the fundraising. This real entrepreneur experience embarked the students with the best lifetime learning that could never be taught if planned.

The final teams are: Lip balm Golden Glow makers from natural products,  Activities Book designers and publishers, Cards designers and makers, Paper Makers created from natural products, the tea makers, researchers and producers of dry herbs for Cups of Hope and the Pencil Case Devil designers. These experiences lead students to sewing, designing, creating, making products through a rich process. The students took full ownership of persevering and continuing to prove by reflecting and learning new steps to apply and build on experiences. The hands on experiences are definitely learning skills from imagining, designing, exploring, creating, trying, analyzing reexamining, reflecting to sharing with the community for fundraising.

As an educator this journey confirms that learning is chaos with rich experiences that embeds more than just concepts. Learning is an eruption of skills that builds new experiences in an environment of perseverance, communication, questioning, listening, conversations of  re-examining the how and the possibilities of reaching for success with a purpose.  It is an experience so realistically rich in effective partnership of a learning enterprise with a passion. of an engaging community. The students have developed characteristics that enhance the ability to analyze based on team based implementations with character developments of ownership and visioning. It continues to be a true adventure!




The students have reached more than curriculum concepts, real skills that they learn to nurture and gain for life. As a teacher it is very important to provide students with skills by having them experience,  reflect in order for them to become aware of these fundamental skills.

I am sharing some students' reflections,  if you take the time to read them you will hear students voices!




The students enjoy programming and coding. The school day is too short, we decided on an after school club for innovations to give opportunities for further experiences and implementations with coding. In January we decided to explore together this venture, by building robots using Makey Makey with Scratch. Our school Improvement Plan focuses on mental health, therefore the robots were to interact with the students and gain feedback about their emotions.  Alison Evans Adnani from http://makerjunior.com/  and her sons were able to join us few times for this expereince.

These unplanned experiences of self-building skills and self directedness of motivation and innovation has also flourished in a life long learning experience for the students. This platform of innovation started from building up conductive materials with the Makey Makey to robots that interact when buttons are pressed by the students for checking about their feelings.

The students for the first time presented the robots publicly at the Director Forum on Tuesday April 7th. They will be presenting to the school as well and they will be getting feedback from the students.

The following videos explain the process of building the robots and I the video of the robots at the Director Forum.

The students are always inspired with opportunities to learn. The Entrepreneurship and the robotic experiences have given students opportunities to be more than just creative, an opportunity for life beyond the classroom. We value creativity on a daily basis, this opportunity has been full of unexpected creative challenges for all by building on our ideas. It is a creativity on the teacher part as well as the student and the ability for us to communicate respectfully and grow. It is the ability of learning how to learn with a growth mind set to continue learning together,

Coding For Success!

Anyone can do it and anybody can be successful at it!

Coding is creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication, it is valuable with interpersonal skills. I introduced coding on the first week of December to my students. I provoked the students' thinking by having each team link to an animation and play while seeing the inside. Students immediately figured out the how of coding. We began co-constructing a criteria and identifying the variety of coding for the script. On the classroom site I shared many coding articles informing parents about the importance of computing language. Once students knew about http://code.org/learn that same evening students were completing the Hour of Code certificate and exploring game designing and sharing them online on the classroom Padlet for coding.

In class immediate collaboration began, guiding each other through the how of coding and sharing new discoveries. Once the coding skills were established, it took students two days to become familiar with the computing language. Students began a project showing their learning about  Social Studies curriculum describing the causes and effects of interactions between European and First Nation for Grade 5 and for Grade 6 Canadian identity by various groups historical and contemporary communities.

Why was coding very successful?

• Peer programming, thinking together 
• Perseverance, resilience and persistence 
• Self- Confidence
• Problem solving
• Sharing thinking 
• Application of new knowledge
• Peer collaborating to improve results
• Explaining their reasoning
• Analyzing 
• Application of feedback
• Reflecting and improving their learning process
• Identifying and assessing ideas for creative application
• Deep discussions and decisions ensuring team strengths
• Collective responsibility for individual expertise 
• Expression of point of view allowing teams to move forward
• Encouraging each others' innovation

Essential skills were highlighted and practiced. Students were getting further ahead by restarting and rediscovering learning by overcoming any setbacks. They were problem solving and caring for each other.

I was activating and giving students the chance to build their self-confidence at learning and I was observing and asking students as they code about the how and what if of coding language. The engagement blossomed and shined and students became tech leaders at improving their thinking, It was a mindset of  learners and creators by unpacking a canvas of many skills.

An example of a certificate and Flappy bird Game

Through Our Learning Connections Fair my colleagues Patricia Fiorino who teaches Kindergarten and Natalie MacDonald who teaches Grade one also spoke about Kodable, Daisy Dinosaur and Scratch Junior. I am sharing the Scratch presentation that has links to the padlets for both classes and also students' reflections and explaining the coding. A group of students also created a site and an Incorporation  for others to try their games and leave feedback.  During the Hour Of Code week my students guided the Grade ones through an online coding Scratch animations.

Gr 1 @NatalieMacDona5 Gr 5 Ss @StGabeSchool #hourofcode guiding gr1 on @scratchteam #ocsb https://t.co/bDKWQYA0MK
— Rola Tibshirani (@rolat) December 11, 2014

Please share your learning from your students when they start coding and unpacking skills.  How successful will your students be at coding?

Google Drawing And Documenting Learning

We have used many tools for capturing the thinking process and documenting our learning, from Audio Boom , explain everything and other IOS apps as well as GAPPS. In this post, I chose to share documentation of learning through Google Drawing. The students have been applying Google Drawing for explaining their thinking and learning since September. The students document their learning process by uploading it on the eportofolios. We have used Google Drawing with Keizena, attaching a link for the criteria on the drawing, checking for comprehension of a text, and screencasting for evidence of applying feedback.

Google drawing with Keizena: Many layers of sharing and documenting.

1- By commenting, this student explained her favorite photo taken during the Terry Fox walk in September at Kanata's Beaver Pond.

2- The student added a link to the same image, explaining her 2 other photos about the Beaver Pond in relation to the same image. At the top of this image the student's initials LC and next the link. 

3-The link leads to  the Google Drawing that explains what is in common of the 3 photos.

4- Students also added their voices to the Google drawing and teacher's  feedback was also recorded.

Google Drawing and success criteria attached on the Drawing. 

A student explained First Nation People adaptation to the environment. When the title (Les Algonquins) is clicked  the  document of the success criteria that is attached will be viewed for feedback.  The students made a copy of the original document of the criteria, shared and attached it to the drawing.

Google Drawing and assessment for reading comprehension

The students  either labeled the events or ordered the boxes after reading a text for a comprehension self assessment. 

We were very fortunate to have the WW1 supply Line Kit from the War Museum. The students created a Google Drawing explaining their feelings about the war by using the strategy CSI ( Color, Symbol and image). One of our focuses was to improve the French grammar, after feedback from the teacher, the students recorded the evidence of the feedback by using the extension screencastify or snagit.

The following video was uploaded on student's YouTube account:

The video explaining how feedback was applied

Another video explaining how feedback was applied was uploaded on my YouTube account using my laptop as some students had difficulties connecting on the Chromebook with the extension.

Students connected  many skills when applying technology for documenting learning: 

•  Responsibility and ownership of learning for providing evidence of the co-constructed criteria of tasks and learning goals, 
•  The responsibility of planing, monitoring, assessing by peer, teacher and self-assessment,  promoting students' control of their own learning by being mindful, intentional and self-directed. 
• Relating skills to self -regulation of the metacognitive process by promoting problem solving, trying and retrying,  applying many strategies, clarification of expectations, reflective questioning for their own perspective of designing learning. 
• Collaboration for sharing, articulating their own learning .
• Organization plays a big part of this process as students document their learning and upload to their eportfolios.

We will continue building skills focusing on the learning process with many tools for metacognitive purpose and making learning visible by the students for their classmates, their parents and for a global audience. Some self-reflective questioning that guides me while planning are:

• Were the expectations clear?
• Did I set a positive environment of trying and retrying by consolidating with my students?
• Did I provide the time for learners questioning about the process?
• Did I ensure learners were motivated? (Provocation so important)
• Did I provide the resources for scaffolding and feedback?