Voyage Coetail

The bumpy road of collaborative work Thanks Jennifer Keenan  for this collaborative work! I really enjoyed working with you and I think we are a great team! Thank you Suzy Ramsden for sharing your brilliant ideas and thank you Tanya Irene and Sean Walmsley for launching this project! This final project has changed from its initial statement. We decided, with the 4 others teachers working at my school and taking the Coetail programme, to work together with 3 others teachers. After realizing (we were told!) that the group was too big, some teachers left it and the others sub-divided the group into 4 groups. At first, it was: The vision for the whole project would be to have a working infographic for students and teachers as a guide, reference and reminder with lesson plans to go with it. Sean and I ( Tanya ) are looking at the big picture. We are trying to create an infographic for posting online that starts the conversation and thinking process but also identifies the 'outcome...

flickr photo shared by William M Ferriter under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC ) license “Are we gonna watch an Internet video today?” That was the first thing my students asked me when entering the room! How exciting to see that they are so interested in the privacy/copyright/cyber bullying issue! What did I do then? I plugged in the microphone and asked them what the Internet is for? [audio mp3="https://magalibrutel.coetail.com/files/2015/11/WhatInternetfor.mp3"][/audio] So they got it! They understood the power of the Internet. However it’s still for them a dangerous place. [audio mp3="https://magalibrutel.coetail.com/files/2015/12/DangerousInternet.mp3"][/audio] Then, some reminded that there is no difference between online and offline worlds. Some people are still mean to each other on the playground! While listening to them, I gave them this comparison: the Internet and a sharp object. It may be dangerous only if we don’t use it properly. But if we take it the ...

flickr photo shared by dianecordell under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license After all the readings I have been doing so far for Course 2, my mind has been shifting from optimistic to pessimistic and vice versa. I’ve felt from old-fashioned to super geeky and vice-versa. I have been so focused on digital citizenship that I think I forgot the why: why do I want to integrate technology in my classroom? Matt Levinson said: Perhaps most important, remember the "why" of technology adoption and evolution. Philips Andover Head of School John Palfrey articulates this well in “Prepare Kids for the Digital Economy," a recent opinion piece for the Boston Globe : Technology has the power to engage students and make learning more fun. So much of learning happens outside of the classroom; we need to connect our in-school activities with our kids' out-of-school interests. By emphasizing creative tasks and experimentation, we can ensure that children see school in a whole ...

flickr photo shared by GotCredit under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license One of our key goals is to stop focusing quite so much on "do kids have computers in their classroom?" and start focusing more on "do kids have the basic social skills and cultural competencies so that when they do get computers in their classroom, they can participate fully?" I completely agree with this quote from the framework of PLAY (Participating Learning and You). And I had to start by educate myself with these terms: Creative Commons, mashup and remix. I found out how they could unlock our creativity and most importantly I learned how they could fit in the classroom. My research led me to Common Sense Graphite website. I was very inspired by reading this blog post that was linked to a lot of great resources to teach my students those social skills and competencies. I had at a fingertip all the tools I needed, I just had to figure out how I will introduce the lesson to them. My Gr...

Before starting my readings for this post, I was sure that I was fully managing my digital profile and therefore my privacy was respected. What makes me think that? As I explained in a previous post, ten years ago, I was a wannabe journalist. To promote myself I joined LinkedIn . As I wanted to grow my professional network and that I was on the look out for job opportunities, I used it to show case my works. So it made sense for me to be very careful about what to post online. Every once in a while, I checked my digital profile to make sure that I was easy to find and that there were no confusion. My full name is not that common. If you searched for it you were likely to find my LinkedIn profile and some articles that I wrote years ago. At the end of the search, you’d probably find this funny cartoon character from Brazil. This Magali has a passion for food! And then my surname gave approximate results with “brutal” so it linked to lots of news website. No worries that it could be me!...

By now, we all have a digital footprint but is it a good thing or a bad thing? No need to look for a very long time to understand that every thing we do on the Internet is stored somewhere. We kept on hearing and reading that “The Internet is forever” . For me it seems that the Internet is the villain of the piece. If we misinterpret the message that the media send we could understand that the Internet is not a safe place, and that everybody knows everything about anybody including me! It also seems that even if I would stop right away to go online, erase all my accounts and activities, it wouldn’t be enough. That’s too late! Because all my friends would have post things about me. Should I become paranoid and should I feel worried about that? Shouldn’t I think the opposite? In the 21 st century, wouldn’t it be worst to not have a digital footprint at all? [caption id="attachment_95" align="aligncenter" width="186"] Image by Penny Bentley -Digital Footpri...

Here is another good reason why I’m learning with Coetail . At our school we had two big events over the last two weeks: the French open class day where parents come to see and participate in French lessons and the PTC. During the PTC, I had excellent feedback from the parents, they were ecstatic to see IT integration in my lessons! For my final project I choose to do a story map with my Grade 3 students. This group started to learn French last year. I choose to do geo-literacy as the subject space is at the same time an easy one but also a difficult one as it takes time for the students to transfer the French to the English. I’m not even sure that a 8 year old can find his/her way easily in his/her own home language. In this case the best way to learn is to practice. The final product for the students would be to screen-cast their story map and to post it on their class blog. This project allows the students to work on the four attainment targets: listening, reading, writing and spea...