Future Vision project and Reflection

I appreciated this course for its professional learning network.  I started out this course with concerns of my first-time use of Prezi in a grade 6/7 class.  Initially the review of literature for my blog (Jan 19^th and 24th) supported my idea that Prezi would assist in student learning.  The encouragement from my course colleagues, that my student’s would enjoy using Prezi and they would be able to navigate the site easily, helped to reduce my anxiety of introducing a new program.  Tips on how to have students sign-in, and how to see their work in progress were very useful.  Learning that Prezi can be built collaboratively by students when students share access to a Prezi, opens the possibly for me to use different teaching formats in the future.  Right now (or at least in a few moments when I finish this post), I am marking some wonderful inquiry research projects on extreme environments that my students created on Prezi!

I have clearly heard that my experience with finding and selecting French language

resources for immersion schools, and the feedback from my teachers on their appropriateness would be useful to share to create a larger PLN for myself.  When I review the hits on my blog, they are mostly 10 to 20, but the one on “Sources of reviews of French language resources” (Feb 6, 2014) has over 130 hits.  I know a lot of this traffic was encouraged by Aaron’s retweet.  By looking at hits, I have also learned that sharing my knowledge is a combination of Twitter and Blogging.  As Aaron said “one is the River” of streaming knowledge and the other is "the shore” of socially created knowledge that readers can return to.  The importance of Twitter in sharing and learning was re-emphasized by a recent Twitter post by Jon Campbell (@MrCampbell57, Apr 4) “Twitter might be the second biggest source of Pro-d info I have after my colleagues in the prep room, #edfling”.  I see this as my post-course challenge to develop a larger PLN than my School District, by reaching out with Twitter and Blogging.

 

http://www.inuksite.com
 

I was very pleased that I could do a final project that met course requirements, but also met the needs of teachers of French immersion community in my School District.  Here is my final vision,  a list of recommended websites appropriate for kindergarten and primary French immersion students.  I have curated my recommended websites on Delicious.  Or I should say the “first draft of my final vision” as I continue to receive teacher feedback and hear of new websites to include.  As usual, I appreciated that we did background research before starting our project.  One quote that I found, that kept been repeated in my mind as I curated these websites (blog March 4) was “activities should provide context to help the students create meaning of the vocabulary, which brain research, has shown helps students learn and retain information” (Characteristics of Young Learners 2009).  To finalize this project, I will add these sites to our school website to assist students in accessing and using these resources.    

I loved the collegiality of this course!  I think using Google+  for chats and being able to visually meet my colleagues really helped me build my PLN.  I look forward to meeting you in person at future Teacher-Librarian or Teacher conferences.  Thanks for your energy!

References:

Characteristics of Young Learners.  2009.  Pearson Education.  Retrieved March 12, 2014 from http://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205535488.pdf

Jon Campbell.  April 4, 2014.  Twitter post retrieved from https://twitter.com/MrCampbell57 .