ADE Day 1 - The Brand of Me

My first day at the Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE) Workshop was a long one, not long in the sense of "drawn out and when is this going to end" long. But, "full of energy and man I'm beat, we talked about a lot and reflected a lot" long. It was a great start to the workshop and apparently things will ramp up tomorrow with the HCMC ADE Race.

Most of the morning was spent talking about "Personal Branding", both as an educator and as an ADE. It was uncomfortable. It was difficult. But that's what makes us grow. Educators aren't used to talking about themselves. We like to talk about the great things students (and in my case the staff as well) are doing, creating, publishing and achieving ... not ourselves. The sessions made us think about who we are and what roles we play in life, both educationally and personally. The idea being that we have to tell "our story". After paring down the brainstorming list of roles I play to three, here's how far I got using a Mind Mapping App called Total Recall.

The next steps are to refine, revise, reflect and create the presentation as a movie, photo, on the stage or written. I'm leaning towards a movie or a presentation. The afternoon focused on pointers to enhance each of the above modes of presentation.

Then, the day was capped off with a rousing and passionate keynote address by film maker and director, Chai Yee Wei. Here is a review of his first film Blood Ties. Probably not something you'll see in a classroom anytime soon ... at least I hope not.

I'd love your feedback on the Mind Map and if you feel there is anything I could add.

Thanks. Early start tomorrow with a Photo Walk of a HCMC wet market at 6:00 am.

Teaching Science and Humanities with Technology

Part of the focus for ongoing professional development this year at the high school has been learning about new and meaningful ways to implement technology in classroom. I'd like to share two recent classroom activities with you.

First, Tanya Nizam's grade 9 Science class. Tanya has been using blogs to have students share hypotheses and data. They also used the blog to analyze data, charts and the MYP assessment criteria, giving the students the opportunity to comment on each other's posts. It was a great way for the students to be engaged in a virtual discussion that could be happening at any time. Then follow-up discussions in the classroom reinforce the concepts and understandings.

Have look at the 9C Electricity Investigation Blog.

Second, in Travel and Tourism, Scott Little had students create a "glog" using Glogster. The students' glogs were to showcase an adventure or eco-tourism travel destination of their choice.

One student told me that she felt she learned more by creating a glog, rather than writing an essay, because it was fun to create the glog (so she was more engaged in the activity) and she got to illustrate her travel destination using photos, videos, sound clips, charts and graphs as well as text (addressing multiple intelligences).

Click to see student glogs about Italy, Malacca, Chamonix, Tanzania and Kenya

Enjoy the learning!