Collaboration, Communication, Community 

These are definitely a few of my favourite things!  And I am so grateful that I work with such wonderful colleagues who want to collaborate and communicate about what we are doing in our classrooms!  It is such a wonderful sense of community, especially in my wing of the school where many of us plan together and do the same things with our students.  

For example, I am doing my second field study on the concept of #geniushour and blogging with my class and it is so wonderful that my neighbour down the hall, Mr. McDonald, is doing the exact same activities with his grade 7s.  We talk, email and tweet about what we are doing (successes, struggles) everyday and it is so valuable to have this sense of community here and to know that I am not trying out new activities/teaching styles on my own but that there is someone here in the exact same boat as me.  

I am also fortunate to have such a wonderful PLN on twitter, and I also collaborate with them (especially about #geniushour).

Speaking of #geniushour, it is going really well!  So far this month, students had three Monday afternoons to work on their personal inquiry projects and this Monday they will present to the class what they accomplished during that time.  I am really excited to see the powerpoints, movies, etc this Monday. And I am so thankful to Mrs. Krebs and Mr. McDonald for helping me along my journey.

Mr. McDonald's class website
My class website
Mr. McDonald's students' blogs
My student's blogs
Follow Mr. McDonald @hughtheteacher
Follow me @gallit_z
Follow Mrs. Krebs @mrsdkrebs

For term two, I have decided to focus my 2nd field study on doing a student-directed project called genius hour and our blogs about it.

Even though the term at SFU hasn't started yet, I was too anxious to wait so we began this week!  I explained what genius hour was to the class (an hour per week in which they would be able to learn about whatever they want; becoming a genius in whatever interests them and that after a few weeks we would present our learnings to the class) and their first task was to blog about what they wanted to focus on.

A few students needed some help coming up with ideas, but the rest were really excited to start learning about/doing what they were passionate about!  On Monday afternoon, I had some students in the computer lab researching and creating powerpoints, some students filming movies that they later wanted to create into iMovies, one student painting and some writing scripts for french cooking shows!  Everyone was excited and everyone was on task!  I helped out as needed but really tried to push the students to problem solve and troubleshoot on their own.  It was amazing!

As a teacher, I was a little apprehensive to give up so much of the control to the students, but I am now a firm believer in genius hour!