Journeys In 2.0 Teaching

The Wikiseat Project: So Much More Than Just a Stool

2013-04-29T06:07:00.002-07:00

The Wikiseat Catalyst Students in my Design class have been working at home for the past 4 weeks on their Wikiseats. The Wikiseat Project in short is to take a piece of welded angle iron call the 'catalyst' and make a seat from this platform, but it's so much more. "WikiSeat explores the possibilities of new teaching methods in core subjects such as science, mathematics, English, and

Sketching a Moon Man

2013-02-26T08:46:00.002-08:00

Students in block 1 Design class have been working on many different types of sketches. Today I shared with them a sketch that was done by my day circa 1973/74 when he sketched and animated a moon man walking. He captured each of the drawings with his super 8 camera. I'm going to try and get a copy of it from him to share as well. For no, here's the moon man.

Inspirations Everywhere: DIY Sketchbooks in the Classroom

2013-02-03T13:47:00.001-08:00

Introducing Design One major focus of Multimedia and Design class this semester is for students to sketch and sketch often. We have a sketch a day where I give physical, visual and auditory prompts for students to respond to in sketches. I think that sketches are the foundation of designing. On Friday I had a 2 hour Google hangout with Fred Galang. This conversation had so many topics that

Looking for a Few Good Designers

2013-01-29T12:37:00.002-08:00

Source: Sketchchair.cc Last October I was fascinated by the idea of using technology to design and fabricate furniture. I saw a Kickstarter project by Sketchchair that made me think about how furniture is designed. I've never made furniture, but with some investigation into the world of flat pack, ready to assemble furniture I was hooked on the idea. All I needed then was some way to fabricate

The Maker Within

2013-01-29T10:50:00.001-08:00

Skills, What Skills? Over the past year and a half I've developed a serious personal interest in making things. It has come from the realization that as a student of our public school system that preaches to the average kid that they must get a degree to be successful. This was echoed at home, both my parents got degrees, my dad is a adjunct university instructor and is currently working on his

Duct Tape Learning

2012-10-28T22:46:00.003-07:00

laser cut snowflakes I created This is my 100th post! I know I should be sharing more, so I"m going to try and share the happenings in my Technology and Design class for the rest of the semester. The title of this post hopefully got you thinking about what duct tape learning. When we think of duct tape we think of fixing, repairing, creating constructing, etc. That's exactly the kind of work

The Early Bird Gets the Laser Radar?

2012-09-19T06:32:00.004-07:00

Great fall morning here in Cold Lake! I'm up WAY earlier than normal and off to school to check out the project of 2 students in my Technology and Design course (temporary name until something better comes to mind). The premise of the class is for students to get big idea challenges/questions and have them use the design process to attack them. They will then use the digital tools provided to

Students with Lasers? Yes Please!

2012-03-25T12:04:00.002-07:00

Tuesday last week as a great day. I had a 3 hours of impromptu PD thanks to Mother Nature. A freak dump of snow caused our busses to be cancelled. We only had 1 student in our whole school. A colleague of mine Brent Stasiuk gave me a ring and asked if I wanted to take a trip to the French Separate school down the road to see some amazing technology in action. When I arrived I was in awe of what

Creating Connections Between Digital and Physical Worlds

2012-03-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

This morning my son Jack was trying to use a mouse to open a web link we have on our iMac desktop. He's 5 and is fully capable of working any iPhone, iPod touch and iPad in our home. I saw him struggle a bit to move the mouse around. It wasn't easy for him, but eventually he was able to navigate to where he needed to click. What struck me about this event was that with touch interfaces coming to

Creating Learning from Crappy Situations

2012-03-12T10:35:00.002-07:00

Last Friday I was away working with some of my awesome broadcasting students and had a substitute teacher take my class. While I was away our director ran the newscast as we always do each day at Cold Lake High School, and everything seemed to go off without a hitch. The news had some audio issues with a mic and our weather man had to pinch hit as an anchor, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Design Studies Update

2012-01-18T13:15:00.000-08:00

With the semester winding down things I'm thinking about the past three months with my design studies class. More than anything, what I hope to get from this three month coup of the class is some serious learning from the students and myself. Here's a quick look at how things are going. Enthusiasm FTW! Students who are motivated in the class and are already tech savvy are rocking the Kinder

Kinder Toy Design Project

2012-01-18T09:57:00.000-08:00

In December my design studies students and I travelled to do real field research with a kindergarten class. Seeing high school students paired up with little ones was a cool experience. I had this crazy idea and I wanted it to turn into an opportunity for my students. I've also started to develop the course as we go along on my class wiki, where you will also find other "personal projects". All

Learning in Public #6- Moral and Ethical 3D Printing?

2011-11-27T19:39:00.001-08:00

My First Modelling Challenge for Myself 40 hours of work into the Makerbot obviously isn't enough. I keep coming back for more! This weekend I was able to spend some awesome time with a friend and fellow ADE Jason Sand. If you aren't following Jason on the Twitter, do it here now! Jason and I were at a Final Cut Pro X training session for two days. During this weekend of hockey and refreshments

Learning in Public Reflection #5

2011-11-22T18:42:00.001-08:00

The Makerbot is up and running in full swing. I've printed alligators, dinosaurs, moustache rings and now a moustache cookie cutter. The learning curve is fairly steep, but the work done by others is making this learning so enjoyable. What's awesome about the 3D printing community is that they are much like my Tweeps: THEY SHARE! They don't judge (too much) and will always point me in the right

Learning in Public Reflection #4- Success at Last!

2011-11-16T20:20:00.001-08:00

I've been taking a lot of videos and time lapse sequences about how I've taken on one of the largest personal learning projects I've taken on in a long time. Building a Makerbot 3D Printer. Here's a Makerbot 101 video to check out. Below is a time lapse of part of the build. All of this has been from a post by Dean Shareski who has challenged his pre-service teachers to spend 25-50

It Began With a Marshmallow

2011-11-07T21:40:00.000-08:00

Students were DQ'd if they ate their marshmallow. Some groups used permanent marker to ensure this wouldn't happen. Today was an awesome day. Hot on the heels of some great collaboration and conversations with colleagues and tweeps I started my Design Studies unit with The Marshmallow Challenge. Huge thanks to Rose Lapointe for guiding me in this way. I now realize that I was the student and

Opening Up to My Staff

2011-11-06T20:37:00.000-08:00

A few people on my staff know I blog about my class. Most don't I don't advertise a lot on staff that I tweet, read blogs, and collaborate with people outside my school more than inside my school. This really struck a chord with me recently. So, under the guise of asking for supplies for my Design Studies unit, I wrote this email to my staff tonight. I officially came out as a blogger and

Design Thinking: A New Challenge

2011-11-05T00:54:00.000-07:00

This is going to be one of those posts where I'm actually writing for me to try and make some sense of a whole bunch of ideas for the next steps in my multimedia course. Until now, the term 'multimedia' has largely been a farce because I haven't dealt with a true variety of media with students. I'm a video guy, that's where I'm comfortable so that's what we've done. Everything has been about

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? THIS IS ME SHOUTING AT HOW EXCITED I AM ABOUT THIS!

2011-10-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

KABOOM! That's how I would describe my evening tonight. It came in two parts. Part 1- Trying to Get PowerSchool to Work for Outcomes Based Reporting I was happily working out how I can get Powerschool to do outcomes based reporting and having some great discussions on Twitter and Facebook about it. Here's what I was up to: Yes I asked elementary teachers. They do standards based reporting

Hitting their stride at RTV

2011-09-28T09:57:00.000-07:00

Signs of Success Today I am home with my son Jack who is sick. After a couple games of Star Wars Trouble and watching an episode of House Hunters International (you like it too) I noticed it was almost time for the RTV News at Cold Lake High School. Our school uses Ustream each day to broadcast our news show. I was pleasantly surprised to watch the anchors Kyle and Tyson present their team's

One Year Later...

2011-09-25T18:56:00.000-07:00

Note: I started this post over a year ago after listening to Brian Crosby speak. I've mulled over it, and updated much of it. What is in italics is what I wrote originally. What follows is my current situation and how I'm going to address these cold hard truths about my teaching. This is going to be a blog post with two purposes. A serious look in the mirror at how I teach multimedia, and how I

My Response To http://tinyurl.com/3rcnvy6

2011-09-25T09:39:00.000-07:00

Jared Nicholon Sep 25th, 2011@ 11:25 am: Your comment is awaiting moderation.While I do understand that principals are under enormous pressures from many different angles it seems to me that your frustrations about Facebook are from primarily negative experiences.Students who use Facebook to bully and harass others should be dealt with strongly and that is covered in your discipline policy

The 'Formative' Newsroom

2011-09-05T20:59:00.000-07:00

First post of the year. Welcome back y'all. There are some major changes in store for RTV. First and foremost I got my proverbial crap together and purged all my old useless resources that I had and changed my classroom into a meaner, cleaner, news making machine! But now to the good stuff. Once again, I'm turning my class upside down and starting from scratch with a totally different approach. I

"And We're Clear": RTV Finishes Year 1

2011-06-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

It's reflection time with lots of questions to ask myself and hopefully find answers before the next school year. A few people want to know the nitty gritty of the daily operations of our newscast, so here it is.Our daily newscast to our student body has come along way. We've had some pretty awesome opportunities to work with industry professionals, and do the buzzword stuff that people call '

Songs for Tsunami

2011-03-30T12:49:00.001-07:00

On Thursday, March 31, Cold Lake High School will be hosting the second instalment of Songs for Tsunami. This is a fundraiser for relief in Japan. Teachers are being sponsored by students to sing songs Karaoke style! After the first lunch hour over $480 was raised. RTV has been covering the fundraiser. A student recently interviewed Mr. Darrell McDonald about how he came to organize this great