I was scanning some of my student’s sketchbooks for a presentation – thought I’d share some of the images. Thanks to a visit from a graphic designer, students sketch out their Cigar Panels on paper before whipping them up digitally – adds a nice old school flavour: Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend...
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It’s 1837 and violent Rebellions are occuring in both Upper and Lower Canada. Armed conflicts are brewing and the Patriotes are travelling from village to village whipping up support for Francophone liberty. Would you support the rebellions, and what might propaganda posters look like on both sides of the Rebellions? This is the task...
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If you’re looking for a good rabbit hole - start digging into Dan Meyer’s posts on the need for graphic design awareness in the classroom. Thanks to Dan, my sense that graphic design should be a conversation in education has been confirmed. I’ve had a growing sense of this over the last couple years...
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Binary Contemplation from Flickr: Goodnub I’ve had this growing agitation or frustration lately about my use of technology, and in particular, my newly developed addiction to blogging and twittering. I’ve been a ‘heavy user’ of RSS feeds for a number of years, but it’s only been in the last few months that I’ve really...
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Based on positive feedback from a number of our teachers about the Professional Development model we’re using this year, I thought I’d share the format. First some background. Our school has a mandated focus on Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) and integrating technology to support the learning we design for our students. I realize that IBL...
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Right now my students are working through a chunk of Canadian History, examining a series of events that lead up to Confederation. In order to have them understand this flow of events, and how they lead from one to another to the final creation of our country, I have asked students to create a...
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Today both of my grade 7 classes started assembling their second cigar panels of the year. This is one of the key components of the Cigar Box Project where students collect and remix digitized, historic artifacts from a variety of online museums and digital archieves. Students are asked to do this in order to...
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I just finished spending an hour of my Saturday morning attending a free, one-hour online Elluminate session hosted by Classroom 2.0.  It’s great to be able to log on, coffee in hand, and talk with others pursuing similar teaching/technology goals.  This mornings session was on blogging in the classroom – and it was nice...
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After trying to use iChat unsucessfully a number of times to have our student collaborate with Rocky View School division, yesterday I had my students upload their current iMovie projects into Voicethread in give and receive feedback.  Unfortunately, our school bandwidth was not making the use of Voicethread very successful either. So today I...
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The Cigar Box Project was a year-long, Canadian History project embedded in inquiry-based, 1:1 classroom. The Cigar Box Project has won two national teaching awards, and has been presented, locally and internationally. In doing the project, students lived the disciplines of historical thinking, information literacy and graphic design as they used 21st Century tools...
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