On Being Reflective

This year has been a big year for me professionally.  I’ve had a lot of amazing professional development opportunities and I’ve really grown as a teacher.  Besides attending great conferences and workshops, working with colleagues and my digital PLN, the reflective piece has been essential.  

There have been two main reasons why I have reflected more this year…

1. COETAIL, the Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy –   In this 5-course certificate program, we are expected to reflect each week PUBLICLY through a blog.  I have exported that blog to this one.   All the posts prior to this post are from that course.  I have always reflected as a teacher, but writing it down and sharing it makes it so much more powerful.  When I first started teaching, I would reflect, but I never documented it.  Later, I documented my reflections in my unit planners for myself, my colleagues and my administrators to see.  COETAIL “forced” me to reflect publicly.  This was a turning point for me. This form of public reflection really made me think more deeply about what I was doing.  It made me articulate my thoughts more clearly.  It made me feel vulnerable somedays and confident on other days.  (But an important part of this piece, is that through COETAIL, I always felt safe in publishing my reflections.)  The added value of sharing my reflections and getting feedback from others has not only deepened my reflections, but it has improved my teaching and learning.

2. I started to think more about my future in teaching.  I hold two roles as a teacher and a technology coordinator and I really like the balance of the two roles, as long as there is balance.  I did a lesson sequence with my students about balance and really started to consider my own balance.  There are a lot of parts of me that wants to move into an administrative role, but I’ve been thinking long and hard about this and at this time and I’ve come to this conclusion (at least for now):

– I need to teach and know students well to be effective in my curriculum/technology coordinator job.

– I need to be there for my children, and I will not give up extra valuable time with them for work.

– While I still want to teach, I need to find a balance in my workplace where I can be a successful teacher, but also need to have time to run with some of my ideas.

I will continue with this blog for now as a place to reflect professionally – the good and the bad as I fly through my second decade of teaching.

Infographic Issues

I’m just going to start this post by saying that I don’t love infographics.

I struggle to read and find meaning in infographics, the same way I don’t really enjoy reading graphic novels (but I still encourage my students to do so).

The two main reasons I don’t like infographics:

1. I truly have a hard time reading them.  Do I read the words first?  Do I go sentence-image-sentence-image?  Do I go left to right/top to bottom?  I sometimes look at infographics and struggle to find the focal point.  Maybe I’m just looking at the wrong infographics.  I can’t seem to find a flow or get into a “zone” when I’m reading something with a lot of visuals.

2. I think that sometimes the source is hard to find.  I often find really visually attractive infographics with no source listed or a source that I really need to hunt for to find the authenticity or it’s an aggregration of many different sources that may take way too long to validate.

But, I do realize that they have a place.  There are some that are really nice.  I find visual resumes, especially the ones noted here and here, done really well and I can imagine that these applicants definitely have an edge over their competitors.  (Even so much so that I decided to create one of my own a few years back, although it needs a little love before I’ll need to use it.)

So, what type of infographics would I use in my classroom?

Image Credit: XPlanations via http://www.techbabble.edublogs.org

I like this a lot.  I first saw it in Paula Guinto‘s room and she referred to it when she was talking about her learning environment for her kids – both in the room and an extension of that on the web.  I love this and want to post it in my room, but more important, make this happen all the time in my teaching/learning.  A negative to this infographic is that it has a TON of information on it both with text and visuals, which makes it challenging to analyze and synthesize.

 

Image Credit: http://www.debaird.net

Here’s another one I like because we frequently talk about digital citizenship in my classes.  Unfortunately, the audience for this infographic is adults.  I would love to find these statistics for high school and college students and create one for my middle school students.

 

Image Credit: http://www.teachthought.com

The reason I like this is that it’s clear and succinct.  It is easy to read from far away (if printed on a poster in a classroom, for example).  It is really relevant to my middle school students.

 

Image credit: http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6234/6875893248_07146d1191.jpg

I like this infographic.  I agree with this to a point, but more importantly, I think this is provocative and can really start conversations in the classroom.

Last one, I promise…

Image credit: http://www.dailyinfographic.com

I really love this infographic: Words Waiting to Be Added to the Oxford English Dictionary and the conversations it could start in an English classroom.  This could promote writing, like a piece to the OED trying to continue to convince them to add this word, strongly advise them not to, or suggest another word be added to the OED (this would also promote them researching to see if the word they want to add is added or not).  There are some design issues with this infographic, one being the upside down text and another being the years, is that how long the word has been used?

That’s a lot of infographics for someone who doesn’t like infographics.

I think in writing this post alone, my appreciation for infographics has grown a bit.  I still think there are a lot of bad ones out there and I just need to look for really clear infographics that I think help communicate ideas if I’m going to use them in my classroom.

Presentation in Design

Photo Credit: Colors Time via Compfight cc

We all have sat through horrible presentations and we have even made a few.  While I think mine have gotten better over the years, the current COETAIL Course 3 has made me rethink my presentations more.  After looking at a lot of good presentations like from the Learning 2 Leaders, I realize that mine still need a bit more work.  While I don’t think that I could ever be that super engaging, inspiring public speaker, I can at least make up for it in my presentation.

I have a few presentations that I need to revise.

Including most of these.

 

Fourdesignprinciples from Julie Lemley

I think this presentation on the four design principles needs the most work, especially after going to Noah Katz Presentation on Visual Literacy this past weekend.  I’m embarrassed to say that I took the scaffold of this presentation from my wonderful first tech teacher mentor, Gaby Ezyaguirre, many, many years ago and the presentation hasn’t really had any “love” since. … and is that it’s about DESIGN, for goodness sake.  (This is when you know COETAIL has created a safe learning environment… when I’m really willing to post up embarrassing work!)

There is too much white spaces

It looks dated

There are no strong visuals

It does show some of the elements of design, but in a boring way, that I wouldn’t want my students to replicate.

When I first started teaching technology about 8 years ago, I was using this presentation to teach myself as well.  The not-so-pretty PowerPoint template it was created on is pretty bad too.  What is maybe MORE horrible is the amount of views/downloads this has gotten on Slideshare.net since I put it up there three years ago.

Here is my revised Elements of Design Presentation:

 Reflection:

This presentation is definitely prettier than my old presentation.  I do worry about my students really understanding the information I am trying to present.  I will definitely have to provide other resources to my students and do more work in class showing examples of what the design elements look like on different forms of media, specifically ones they create: video, posters, presentations using different materials and software.

Now I definitely need to give Haiku Deck a lot of credit on this, as well.  They make it really difficult to create a bad presentation.  They have beautiful images and the formats only allow for limited text.  This forces the creator really to think about their presentation.

I will be presenting this to my seventh graders later in the year.  I’m thinking I’m going to give a pretest to my students before I give the presentation, then retest them after.  I am even considering giving the old and the new presentation to different classes.  While I definitely know this new presentation is more visually appealing, I need to figure out how to support this presentation to my students, especially students with oral comprehension difficulties and second language learners, who may need more support while I’m presenting.  I’ll try to remember to reflect back once I share this presentation with my students.

As far as the presentation uploaded to Slideshare, the more I reflect on this presentation, the more embarrassed I am by the presentation.  But, it has gotten a lot of views and downloads… but it’s also connected to my name/brand.  Should I just take it down?  I need to take a look to see if I can just revise/replace the presentation at that URL but I’m not sure that is possible.  I welcome any feedback regarding this.

Design Challenge: Beautify my Blog

Little Bits of Change

I always like to start my school year with a fresh, clean, organized classroom and a clean and organized computer.  The same goes for my blogs.   Thanks to the new blog templates and this week’s COETAIL assignment, I’ve breathed some new life into my blog.  A goal I had last year and one I want to continue to work on, is “to inspire my students”.  Through a Design teacher’s eyes, to me, this is inspiring my students  to be creative.  I like to share examples I find in the real world, things I create, and I’m trying to design more inspirational spaces in our classroom and Design labs.  COETAIL Course 3 seems like it’s totally in-line with this, so I’m excited to learn more and implement all these new ideas in my class and teaching.

After reading this week’s readings, it confirmed that I’m on the right track.  There were some good examples I can use, especially when I talk to my students about their blogs and how the design of their blogs impacts their readers.  In particular, I found the article, Understanding Visual Hierarchy in Web Design very useful and it provided good examples that I could even use with my students.

I spent a lot of time updating my COETAIL blog today, and I’m happy with the way it turned out.  I started playing with it before I started this first assignment, so I don’t have a true before/after picture.

Here’s a sort-of before (but not what it looked like the past six months) – I loved the simplicity of the theme I activated at the beginning of the COETAIL course, but I did not like the fact that someone had to click on an individual post to find the comments section.  It wasn’t very intuitive.

 

Here’s another screenshot about an hour into Project Design: COETAIL Blog:

I love green and gray, but I felt that there was too much gray and too much white space, which left my blog looking a bit boring.

And the last one I’ll bore you with:

I think I tried all of the templates and like bits and pieces of each theme, but not one of them 100%.  In the end, I am happy with the Berlin theme.  I created a new category named “Latest Posts” because I think that blog readers immediately want to see the most current posts (as I do) and the “recent post” widget can only be put half way down the page.  I’m not sure what this will look like in the long term, but I’ll change it later if need be.  I’m wondering if my posts are going to get lost after leaving the “Latests Posts” sections.  I’d love some feedback on this!

One element I had to play around with was the “featured image” because I think that the power of the Berlin template is in its image display and slideshow.  However, I struggled to give attribution to these images, especially because I like using the “Insert by URL “option when embedding media because then I feel like it’s not wasting extra space on anyone’s servers.  This is a piece that I need to play around with a bit more.

I struggled with what pictures I should showcase in the slideshow feature.  I ended up uploading four photos – a mix of student projects, my classroom/Design Lab and my students working.  While these images may be better on my class blog, I think it’s important that I’m connecting who I am as a teacher on this blog.  Since we are all spread out all over the world, my fellow COETAILers and I don’t have the luxury of walking into each others’ classrooms.  We learn a lot from each other by reading each other blogs, commenting and tweeting ideas and questions, but there is a greater gain from being able to really see what others are doing in their classroom.   Hopefully through images and reflections, we can better share who we are in the classroom as well.

Now that my blog is visually where I want it to be, I just need to catch up and add more content!  Week two post, coming soon!