My work this week has me thinking more deeply about transitions from physical to digital spaces. The work I am doing with my students to create visual posters has connected to assessment practices, visible presence in community, and risk when revealing yourself to larger audiences. I'm asking students in both my classes to create a visual poster that showcases what they know about a topic of their choice. This visual poster will connect and model media and digital skills to others in the Faculty of Education and potentially to larger educational communities. They will post these visual posters in a physical space, visible to all members of our teaching/learning community, something they are interested in sharing. This will reveal to others what they have created or located in digital spaces. The students will risk revealing themselves when they publicly show what they know about topics relevant to teaching and learning about media and digital literacy. As I think about learning, isn't that what teachers ask in all learning events - reveal your thinking, show what you know, make it visible? Shouldn't we, as teachers, be doing the same thing - consistently? The real challenge comes when we move from physical places to digital spaces.
That brings me to Aviva Dunsinger. She's a risk taker of extraordinary strength. She's one teacher who models for others what it means to teach and move between physical and digital spaces. Aviva started this year with one word (uncomfortable) to shape her teaching craft. She blogs about her teaching (Living Avivaloca), tweets out what her students are doing each day (@avivaloca), and shares the story of their collaborative learning (Our Wonderful Wednesday). On a daily basis, Aviva shows what she knows about herself as a teacher and what her students are learning in her classroom. Her reflective practice is visibly done for larger audiences to see, with feedback that shapes her teaching and her student's learning. Her teaching practice moves fluidly from the physical place of the classroom to the digital space of social media (blog, twitter, storify, etc.).
That brings me to Aviva Dunsinger. She's a risk taker of extraordinary strength. She's one teacher who models for others what it means to teach and move between physical and digital spaces. Aviva started this year with one word (uncomfortable) to shape her teaching craft. She blogs about her teaching (Living Avivaloca), tweets out what her students are doing each day (@avivaloca), and shares the story of their collaborative learning (Our Wonderful Wednesday). On a daily basis, Aviva shows what she knows about herself as a teacher and what her students are learning in her classroom. Her reflective practice is visibly done for larger audiences to see, with feedback that shapes her teaching and her student's learning. Her teaching practice moves fluidly from the physical place of the classroom to the digital space of social media (blog, twitter, storify, etc.).
This transition from physical to digital places and spaces requires more than an interest in technology and teaching. It requires a change in mindset. Aviva echoes my own thoughts when she blogged about thinking, acting and being a digital teacher (Learning from Today). It's who we are, how we relate to our physical world. Digital is embedded in our physical space. As I think about this migration between the physical and digital, I'm becoming more aware of the barriers and affordances this can create. It's essential that learning more about UDL (universal design for learning), the passage from physical to digital or digital to physical, becomes part of my understanding. So my own learning continues. The evolution from physical to digital will become more refined. There is more to this personal transmutation than any visible poster could show.