Future Vision Project Reflection Post

We have somehow made it to the end of LIBE 477! I've appreciated learning with and learning from my colleagues throughout this course. I have so many resources and things to look forward to in my journey to becoming a teacher-librarian!

As a TTOC with no classroom or library of my own, I have decided to immerse myself in technology and create content to get other educators excited about the 21st Century Literacies in the form of a comic strip. As mentioned in my last post, I had to re-write my script a few times, as the short, quippy writing style isn't something I am used to. I also had to revamp how I was going to illustrate my comic. I wanted to do a comic specifically as a challenge to myself. Both my students and myself read comics and graphic novels, but I have never seen myself as an artist. I wanted to use this opportunity to try! Maybe drawing with a digital program like IbisPaint would give me confidence in my skills. Maybe I was better at art than I thought I was! Nope. I was right. I peaked in grade 7. This was awful. But I wasn't about to give up, I just needed to change my method.

In my last blog post, I tried out a couple of apps and played around with a wooden robot toy that folds up into a block (kind of like a rubik's cube). After making that little example comic strip, it sparked an idea! I originally tried to use an image on my laptop as the background, kind of like a makeshift green screen, but every time I tried to take a photo, the screen had weird lines on it. So, I went to google and found an image of a living room (mine was too messy after a 2.5 year old rampaged all day) and set to work using the Seedling Comic Studio App for iPhone. The living room photo I chose can be seen here along with a long list of other very nicely decorated and cleaned kid-friendly rooms that look nothing like my home, in case you need some inspiration.

I enjoyed using the app, and then got to the part where I was going to add myself. Originally, I was going to actually take pictures of myself and superimpose me into the comic. That seemed like more work than I was ready for with just my phone, so I took some inspiration from a middle school teacher that I am working with who uses Bitmoji images on daily schedules, lessons, and worksheets. It was actually really fun to use and explore and, as the Bitmoji themselves are .png files, were really easy to add to the Seedling Comic Studio app! I then brought my robot to school to use my colleague's classroom as a backdrop for the second half of my comic, as it was actually really tedious cutting the part of the image out that I needed from a .jpg file. I was worried that it would be too much of a contrast by having the robot superimposed at first and then included as the background later on, but I like the change stylistically with the change in setting.

I also used Canva to create the infographics about the 21st Century Literacies and my five visions for my future classroom. This app fit my purpose, but I found that the free version wasn't as adaptable as I had hoped. Trying to find pre-made templates to fit with the amount of text that I needed was tricky, but I guess that's the nature of the infographic. I ended up using the program through my browser, as it was way too frustrating to try to edit on the phone.

Going through this process of figuring out a new technology and how my old skills (or lack thereof) can fit into it was really fun, and definitely made me more excited about doing more student-led, inquiry-based projects with students in the future. It is exciting to have a vision, but even more excited to be able to adapt and change and come up with something better than your original idea. I would love to share this project with my future students someday to inspire them to try something out of their own comfort zone. I purposefully have not added any pictures to this blog post as my comic strip was literally just posting jpeg after jpeg after jpeg. I hope that this is okay and that the comic speaks for itself (and actually makes sense).

To view my final comic strip about my vision of teaching and learning for the 21st Century, click here or the "Vision of the Future" tab at the top the page. My references and resources can be found here or under the "Resources" tab.

Vision For The Future: Learner Considerations

I'm going to backtrack a bit here, as it seems that I misunderstood the point of the first blog post. I re-read the entire assignment and modules and am going to include some more of my thinking from last week as well as the learner considerations for this week.

Using the format of a comic strip, I am going to share my Vision for the Future as a 21st Century Classroom Teacher. My trusty sidekick B.O.T. (Binary Online Teacher) will help explain the key elements that I hope to see in my own classroom or library someday. These elements include:

• Collaboration, both online and in person (genius hour, multi-aged learning)
• Using portable technology fluently (laptops, tablets, phones)
• Classrooms without walls (both online and IRL - outdoor classrooms/fieldtrips/in the community)
• Encouraging problem solving skills and ethical thinking
• Being a role model for life-long learning by learning new technologies alongside my students

My goals are to:

• Create content that is easy to read/understand/visualize
• Use humour to identify what my 21st Century classroom will look like
• Learn how to use comic making tools to create an artifact for this project and beyond

I have been trying to find a book that I read shortly before I graduated from my BEd called The Third Teacher: 79 Ways You Can Use Design to Transform Teaching and Learning. It is in a box somewhere, I just haven't been able to find it, but I found it highly influential as I finished up my teaching degree. I have found PDF that links each of the "79 ways," which are amazing tidbits to start ideas flowing. The full book has interviews and excerpts from educators like Sir Ken Robinson and David Suzuki that I was really hoping to grab some wonderful quotes! I still have time, so hopefully it will turn up. Even if I don't end up using it for this project, it is a book that I highly recommend.

In terms of "learner considerations" for this project, I am making this with the audience of teachers in mind. I am hoping to use the platform of the comic to simplify ideas and make them readable, relatable, and understandable. I will upload my comic as a new blog post and will create a separate "resources" page on my blog that will act as a sharable list of resources that I have found to help make my vision become a reality.

I am hoping that students will enjoy reading it too. That they will see a cute comic to read and then learn something. I want my students to know that I am advocating for change, that I am advocating for their futures. My vision of the future is their reality. In seeing this, students will know that teachers aren't just sitting back and staying the course. We are upgrading our own learning to match theirs, and hopefully they will have some faith restored in their education.

These past couple of weeks I have been writing and re-writing my script to make my ideas more concise. I have always enjoyed writing, but have never really tried writing a comic before. It is definitely a different set of skills! I am enjoying the process, but am used to trying to "beef up" my writing instead of trying to say more with less - although I guess Twitter is good practice for that!

I am trying out a couple of apps to see which I like best. The Canva App offers free templates for infographics, brochures, and even has photo specs for various social media pics (Instagram's square VS Facebook's cover photo). I'm enjoying playing with this app, but don't quite think it is the right fit.

Story Board That has been really fun to play with! You choose from pre-made backgrounds and characters, but get to add your own flair. You get to edit facial expressions, poses, and clothing. There are characters from Medieval times and Ancient Egypt; monsters and mermaids; and even silhouettes for showing people in the background. I haven't found anything that lets you draw your own character, but it seems like a great tool to use for a project that is more about the writing than the art. Here is a screenshot that I took of just some of the ways you can alter your character from panel to panel.

I have also been playing around with the Seedling Comic Studio app for iPhone. This app is super fun! There aren't as many backgrounds or editing of the characters like Story Board That, but you can add in your own photos! It would probably be easier to work with on an iPad with a bigger screen, especially the editing feature of cutting out people from your photo to add them to the comic, but the phone worked pretty well. I am excited to try this one out more.

I hope this helps to outline my vision a little further than I had previously. I am looking forward to continuing on with this project and to see where this idea takes me.

Thinking Out Loud

Students love to talk about the future: what they want to do, where they want to go, and who they want to be. Even just a few years ago when you would ask a student what they wanted to be when they grow up, there were always a plethora of answers from teacher to doctor to artist to bus driver. I have noticed more and more students these days say they want to be a Youtuber or an Influencer. Whatever it is that students right now want to do, the common theme is that they want to be content creators. They want to share their own personal thoughts and ideas with the world around them and make connections online.

In "Why School," Will Richardson introduces us to Jacob Arnott, "a 14-year old Australian who spent three weeks in London covering the 2012 summer Olympics for his two-year-old website, the Sporting Journal." (Loc 185) This is a prime example of a tech-savvy young person who took something they loved and successfully turned it into content for other people to consume. In my future role as a Teacher Librarian, I would love to inspire students to think outside the box and come up with their own ideas of what to create and how to share it, or, at bare minimum, at least provide a space where they feel safe to experiment with different ideas and platforms.

I love stupid jokes. I love puns and wordplay. I love comic strips. They are so short and succinct. The good ones (to me) always end up having some kind of silly punchline to make you groan, or laugh hysterically, or, if you're like me, both. I also love that online comics have begun to tackle social issues. Not only can this platform teach you about other people's struggles and experiences, it does so in a relatable way that hopefully fosters empathy and understanding toward people you might not have thought about otherwise. I love Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Hagar the Horrible, Sherman's Lagoon, and more. Now that I'm an adult, I have all new comics that I love and can relate to in different ways, including Sarah's Scribbles, Fowl Language, and more recently, Damian Alexander.


Not only do these artists share relatable snippets from their own personal lives, they all have their own artistic style that is "not perfect." I always wanted to be good at art, but never was (or never thought I was). I have also always enjoyed technology. I've been reading online comics for years and always wanted to know how they did it. What programs did they use? What is their process for their ideas? How many times do they animate before they have it just right? I know these answers will vary from artist to artist, but creating an online comic strip is something that I really want to explore further and something that I think students will enjoy as well. I have a few programs that I am excited to test out, but I will leave this blog post on a cliff-hanger and keep them hush hush for now.

Bibliography

Alexander, Damian. Damian Alexander: Cartoonist and Storyteller. Retrieved on November 9, 2019 from https://damianimated.com/comics/

Anderson, Sarah. Sarah's Scribbles. Retrieved on November 9, 2019 from https://www.facebook.com/DoodleTimeSarah/ and https://sarahcandersen.com/

Gordon, Brian. Fowl Language Comics. Retrieved on November 9, 2019 from https://www.fowllanguagecomics.com/

Influencer. In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 9, 2019 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing

The Sporting Journal. Blog. Retrieved November 9, 2019 from http://www.sportingjournal.com.au/

Richardson, Will. Why School? How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere (Kindle Single). TED Conferences. Kindle Edition.

Youtuber. In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 9, 2019 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTuber

Final Inquiry Post: A Reflection on the Course So Far

This past week was a busy one and I can't believe it is already November! Halloween was a blast this year! The "Nightmare Before Christmas" season (October to December) is my absolute favourite time of year. I took our son trick or treating around our neighbourhood, ate way more candy that I should have, and got called in to TTOC for a teacher librarian for the first time this year/since starting the program on Halloween day! Luckily I had been in for another teacher at that middle school the previous week, so I knew it was a school that wears costumes on Halloween. I went with the classic: Ms. Frizzle!

Halloween day was a weird day to be called in. The morning had all 4 blocks condensed and there were various activities around the school for the afternoon. It was a quiet morning with very few students coming in, as most classes were doing fun activities, but there were quite a few visits from administrators, support staff, and EAs popping in to see who was there. They were all surprised to find that the library was mostly empty! It showed me that the Teacher-Librarian at this school has opened up the LLC to the students who need it when they need it. Lunch time was a hub of activity, from students playing a Harry Potter trivia game, to looking at Guiness World Record Books together and laughing in awe or disgust at the pages, to kids reading on their own or just talking. A few had books on hold or made returns. It was pretty cool to see. The afternoon activity scheduled for the library was so much fun: building on the LEGO wall! The wall was pretty much the first thing I saw when I entered the library, and it was so cool! We had about 7 or 8 kids with us building their own creations to display for the month. It was neat to see them problem solve and figure out how to build their creation in a specific way to be displayed on the wall in the way they envisioned it to be.

As mentioned above, this is my first course in the Teacher Librarianship Diploma Program and I have so much to learn! I really enjoyed the inquiry portion of this class. It is amazing to be able to use your own ideas to guide where your learning will go. This was a challenge for me both as a TTOC and a newcomer to the program. I still don't quite understand the full scope of the position of a Teacher Librarian. Perhaps if I had taken a more broad introductory course prior to this I would have felt like I had more to add. That being said, going into this course cold REALLY made me in charge of my learning! It helped me to come up with my own ideas first and I can fill in the blanks later. I am glad this ended up being my first course. On a more broad level, moving forward I am going to take the inquiry approach with me. I am going to continue to be a life-long learner not just on Professional Development Days, but every day. I am going to find new topics or programs to be excited about and hopefully share that excitement with my future students.

If I could pick just one topic from Phase 2 that really resonated with me, it would be the very first topic: Fostering Reading Cultures in Schools. I cannot believe how many amazing resources and ideas my classmates had to share! The variety of ideas not only highlighted just how important school libraries are to schools, but also how important the LLCs are in to school culture in general. Every time I have been to a school library as a TTOC, I have to wait to talk to a Teacher Librarian because they are helping a student. They get to know students on a different level than just in a classroom and create connections with the school community as a whole. Fostering a reading culture in schools doesn't stop at reading...it fosters a culture at the school, and that is a beautiful thing.