#bitsofbyte

This is what learning looked like for me today:

One of the great things about being a high school English teacher is that I can say to my class "for the rest of the semester you have the entire class, every Friday, to read a book of your choice", and be gifted to joy of silence for the most part of a Friday.  To be fair, it does takes a bit of work beforehand ensuring that every student has found a book they're interested in, and double checking that they all have post it notes to keep keep track of their questions, comments, predictions and text connections. But the result is a glorious day of silence, where students are entrenched in a good book.  I often use the time to read, or catch up on marking student work (most of my students turn in a 350 word Reading Response, very week, 350 words x 90 students = lots of stuff to read and assess) Today, I used some of this golden time to catch a live stream of the BYTE Conference held in Neepawa, Manitoba. I must admit, I felt a little guilty listening to the BYTE sessions as my grade 12 class was happily reading away, but soon the content of the session pulled me in and curiosity overcame the guilt.

The first session I caught was Ryan Miller talking about songwriting with students.  Song writing is definitely not within my realm of comfort or skill, but I loved seeing Ryan discuss the songwriting projects he had been working on with his students.  One connection I had with Ryan, was the joy of Clustrmaps.  He mentioned that his students loved using Clustrmaps to track all the visitors viewing their blogs and videos. My high school students also use Clustrmaps and marvel at the audience their blogs begin to attract.  I often see that this international audience motivates my students to produce a higher quality of work.

Before long I said goodbye to my fifth period grade twelve class, and said hello to my prep.  I was just in time for the session "Celebrating Our Blogiversaries" by Kirsten Landen (Miss L ‏@MissLwbt ) and Tyler Letkeman (Tyler Letkeman ‏@Tyler_JL). These two impressive teacher candidates from the University of Brandon were one of the reasons I finally took the the plunge and started this blog (the other reason being  Roy Norris @Roy_Norris gave it to me as homework in our Skype conversations-- and I'm a good student who always does her homework!)

The third session I caught was #pegeeks from  Blue Jay Bridge ‏@MrBridge204. I've been approached by several members of the Phys. Ed department here at CHSC for help with various tech topics, so the #pegeeks session was really helpful for me.  I took a few moments to send my PE colleagues a link to the video of the session, and next thing I knew it was after four! The school was empty and I had fallen into a PD rabbit hole.

This evening I had a Skype conversation with (Roy Norris ‏@Roy_Norris). While he "borrowed" wifi at the St. Vital Centre Mall we chatted for a while about all things ELA and tech related, and shared our thoughts on how things were going in our classrooms.

Looking back, I marvel at how important technology has been in all of my PD today (and most days recently).  Today I used streaming videos, Twitter, Instagram, Blogger and Skype to grow my PLN.  I was both PD consumer (thanks to  Andy McKiel@amckiel for the stream) and PD content (thanks to a shout out from Erin Malkoske@erinbrie during her BYTE presentation) and I never left the comfort of my classroom!