A while back we had a PD afternoon themed around inclusivity. For me, this was the perfect opportunity to introduce HyperDocs to my colleagues. HyperDocs are interactive worksheets - they are a little different to printable worksheets, because they have links to a digital resources, and students also answer digitally, (which can mean they contribute to collaborative work). I think they are a great way to flip the classroom or for blended learning - students can work at their own pace and the teacher can assist those who need extra help. 

My top tips for HyperDocs:

• Make them a two column document - with the teacher resources on one side and the space for the students work on the other side. This makes it clear for the students and teachers where their work goes, and also you can clearly see what parts of the document the student is responsible for.
• Distribute it through Google Classroom, so you can automatically make a copy for each student
• Make sure your questions are open, and not 'right or wrong'. We really need to banish multiple choice quizzes as they are just a memory test (fine for checking for understanding/checking students have read/watched something, but not for much else)
• Add in some thinking routines (ideally students should be familiar with these...because they are routines)
• Give students options  - you could do a bingo style, where they have to complete a certain amount of the questions available - or for each box, give the student several options
• Make sure the students are not just typing their responses, they are creating something to share (videos, images, adding to an interactive map, finding and sharing information etc)
• I like to frame my hyperdocs with a debatable question - and have students explore resources on both sides of the debate, before completing their final task.
• Also use factual, conceptual and debatable questions throughout (if you are an MYP teacher, add in your units FCD questions!)
• Use Hyperdocs has a great way for students to practice information retrieval (include citations and get students to summarize their resources, and tell us why they are relevant!)

Here are two of my HyperDocs:

• Is graffiti art?
• Are Robots Beneficial or Dangerous for Society?
• ​(Also  check out this excellent MYP Assessment Hyperdoc our MYP Coordinator Carmen Samanes created for a PD day!)

Here is the training resource I used with my colleagues:

Finally saw some resources to get you started with creating your HyperDocs:

• Ted Ed Lessons - I love this, because they are nearly all interdisciplinary - they are fun - AND they have interesting questions and further resources you can use!
• Have students make videos with Adobe Spark, PowToons, Animaker, Go Animate, WeVideo, or Plotagon. (Don't lock them down to one, give them those as options)
• Have students add to a collaborative document...maybe a MindMap with Coggle, a resource wall with Padlet or a map with Google's My Maps.
• Use online articles - I really recommend The Day. It's aimed at schools and below each article you will find debate questions, activity ideas and further resources, which will help you develop your HyperDocs!
  
  Let me know your top tips and useful resources for HyperDocs.
  

We will be visiting Union Square Station to get food while in Washington DC. Students, in groups, including a teacher, will interview people in the station.

IB Global Context: Globalization and sustainability (exploration: interconnectedness of human-made systems and communities)

One of the more lighthearted activities we have planned for our Grade 10 trip to Washington is Classical Art Memes!
Global Context:  Personal and Cultural Expression (exploration: social constructions of reality)
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We will start off this activity, with the serious prompt "What is Art?"...

...we will then move onto "What is a meme?"

We will then show some students come classical art memes we have found online, (best to do this, instead of letting them freely search, because some online are inapropro...)

Students will be tasked with creating their own. 
We may also let them use any photo manipulation tool they want... Here is an example of people using the Face App on works on art:

This activity can easily be adapted for any art gallery...

On last year's trip we seemed to spend a lot of time at the airport waiting at the gate -to make sure we start off the trip well, we decided to add an activity here!

IB Global Context: Scientific and Technical Innovation  (exploration: adaptation)

The students will get sent a link to the presentation below. It includes information from one of our colleagues, Dennis, a former pilot - as well as the prompt: The plane you are going to fly today may one day also be in a museum. Technology is constantly evolving and adapting and that includes planes! What do you think travel will look like in 30 years time? Students will write their thoughts in their journals.

We think students will get a kick out of seeing these old pictures of Dennis. We will also have them make connections with this presentation when they visit theNational Air and Space Museum in Washington!

What other ways can we kill time while waiting at the gate? I'll bring a few card games, but other ideas would be appreciated :)

Every year our school takes Grade 10 to Washington DC. Last year I became a Grade 10 advisor (to line up with also becoming their Personal Project Coordinator), so had my first ever visit to DC. Two of my colleagues (and friends!), Ilse and Sherry, have been working on changing the experience to make the trip morning meaningful and to link more to the IB - With the help of some thinking routines and the IB's Global Contexts. They brought me on board after their initial planning to help them with the activities.

Throughout the trip, students will be adding notes to a journal. The activities we have designed are supposed to be short and sweet and will not take up the whole time they are at any particular location. 

I will share several of the activities on this blog, so that other educators may use them in they are also visiting DC.

Our activity for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
IB's Global Context: Identities and relationships (exploration: Identity formation; self-esteem; status; roles and role models).
This museum opened shortly after our last trip, so none of us have been there yet. However, we were able to use resources we found on their website. When students arrive at the museum, they will sort themselves in small groups, and will each be given a double sided card. On one side they will see the object they should find when walking through the museum - on the other side they will find prompts to answer before and after seeing the object, (we think there might be a bit of a wait outside)!

Here's a link to the presentation - feel free to make a copy and adapt it for your school. You can also find out more about these images on the NMAAHC website here.

More posts about our Washington DC plans soon :)

I was lucky enough to be chosen as a chaperone for a school trip to China. We took 20 Grade 8 and 9 students, who were all learning Chinese, to Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai.
I took so many photos - here are just a few:

During our first week we stayed at Shanghai High School. The students attended classes throughout the week and  we all stayed in dorms. We ate the amazing school food and got to learn lots about the education system in China. During one weekend the students stayed with host families and we were taken on an adventure with some of the Chinese Teachers.  This was a really wonderful opportunity, as it gave us an authentic experience.

A short while later many of the students visited us in Atlanta. Chinese students stayed with their host families and we had one of the teachers stay with us. Most of the time students just shadowed their buddies, but we also had a few opportunities to come together as a group - including for a session I ran on stereotypes, assumptions and understanding different cultures. This session included both students from our school and SHHS.

Below is the presentation I used for the students and beneath that is a breakdown and reflection of the activities, with a few extra photographs! (You can see in the presentation that in the last slides I added in the students responses)

We started off the session with a Kahoot I created,  called 'Where in the world? China or the USA?". Here I purposefully chose some images to confuse students! This was a good opening activity to get the students to be a bit more flexible.

During the next section I used the Chalk Talk thinking routine - where students walk around adding their thoughts to some prompts, and then add further thoughts to their peers' ideas. Many people do this in silence, but I often think the oral discussion which happens when doing this activity is very valuable (and especially important as many of our students, and obviously SHHS' have English as a second language!)
Here students had several venn diagrams, with one side being 'America' and the other side being 'China'. They had venn diagrams for; food, city life, education, entertainment and family life. I had all the students work together, but it may have also been interesting to have had the groups work individually or give each school different color pens, as it would help us understand who wrote what (both schools made many of the same assumptions about each other) - however, most of this information came out in the group discussion which followed after.

Much discussion actually happened while students were filling in the venn diagrams - but we also came together as a group after.

The next activity was a I Used to Think, Now I think - here students wrote both responses on a post-it note and added it to the board. I would like to have students brainstorm ideas about the country they are visiting before going and then reflect on those later - however as this was a single lesson, students were allowed to look back to before the trip or the start of the class for their 'I used to think' answer.

To end off the session I gave students the prompt "Why is it important to experience and appreciate another culture?". Students answered this through PollEverywhere, which showed all the responses on the board and also turned them into a live word cloud. I was super impressed with their thoughtful and mature responses, as well as how articulate the students were. 

Some of my favorite responses:

• “To know I am tiny but the world is huge.”
• “Because that's when we start to know what the world really is and how we can make it better together”
• “To see the world from a different perspective”
• "It's important to experience other cultures so we put ourselves in other situations and learn from them. So we can understand people and ourselves."
• "We are living in a time that people in the whole world are connected with each other. Experiencing and understanding a different culture can help us make the world a better place together, a world with less wars and conflicts, so everyone can be better off"

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I've added the responses from the last two activities into the last slides of the presentation at the top of this post.

Taking part in this Chinese exchange was truly inspiring - This exchange is organized by our Chinese teacher Jie Wu. She has given me so much 'food for thought', as well as so much delicious Chinese food! My teaching is better because of her influence. Hopefully we will collaborate more together in the next school year (watch this space!)

Here are some other unit/lesson ideas I had from our trip:

• What is Weird? A look at the things we think are normal about our culture, that others may find unusual, (for example; the food we eat). Also links to this TED Talk: Weird, or just Different?
• Maccy Ds and CocaCola! - How global companies tap into local traditions to market themselves around the world (I saw McDonalds advertising on the rickshaws in Beijing (image above) and CocaCola on Chinese lanterns along the old canals! We also stopped in a McDonalds while I waited for some new glasses to be made, and saw the ways they had adapted their menu, (the FoodNetwork has more info about there here.)
• How do people see us around the world?  Often we look at why we have a bias/make assumptions/believe certain stereotypes, but do we know how others perceive us or the assumptions they make about us? I definitely knew many of the British stereotypes Americans had before moving here (though I didn't realize how often they think we eat fish and chips), but what stereotypes exist in other places about me?
• Selling ourselves around the world. We all know that the Chinese food we eat abroad is not really similar to authentic Chinese food - in fact many of the regulars on my Chinese take-away menu back home, do not appear on any in America. An interesting exploration could be looking at Chinoiserie, which is western art and antiques using Chinese styles (including many objects that were made in China for a foreign market).
• How can we use innovation to help us redesign our cities? We went to visit theBeijing Museum of Urban Planning...the title sounds pretty dull, but it was probably one of my favorite places we visited! We learnt how the city was designed on a grid and why. We looked at the new commutable areas that are being built outside of Beijing - often with almost-utopian views (for example, rules related to how far a library and park can be from each person!). Although Beijing has problems with pollution and over-crowding the museum showed us some of the many forward thinking ways they are tackling these issues.
• What do tourists buy? There are whole industries made up of creating and selling 'tourist tat'. So many gifts/souvenirs you buy abroad would never be seen in someone's house from that country. How many people born and raised in New York have mini statue of liberties in their house? How many people from Margate suck on a piece of rock regularly? How many people in China have some of the posters/keychains/other touristy things I bought in their homes? I think this could be a great unit, and could have students look at some of the photography of Martin Parr. Students could also look at why we bring home souvenirs (could also link to a discussion on why we need photographs to document our trips, instead of just memories!)

This was a great opportunity for me, as I tend to only ever visit France (where my mum lives) and England (where the rest of my family live). Although I am slowly exploring more and more of America, I definitely want to see more of the world. On the top of the list of Japan and Mexico. Where else should I visit? What has been your most inspiring vacation?

I am writing up my reflections from the Project Zero conference I attended last October - Project Zero Perspectives: Learning Together, Leading Together. See my post on Art and Contemporary Issues here and Stepping into Character here.

When first looking at this photograph I thought it was a painting. Something about the soft tones and the lighting makes it look almost beautiful. It's only when you look deeper and find out more about the context that the ugliness is revealed.

We reflected on a picture about the Dandora trash problem in Kenya following different layers of implication to uncover a global perspective of the issue at hand.

• What is the story to me?
• What is the human story?
• What is the world story?
• What is the new story?
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Only through slow looking and purposeful conscious perspective taking we can develop global competence.  By developing global competence in ourselves we can create learning experiences for our students to develop global competence themselves. This was the perfect image for this activity, because at first it seems like a problem so far away that it is almost other worldly - only when you look at the story to you do you start to think more about the direct impact your actions have on places like this. It would be a great opening activity for a unit using the IB's Global Context Globalization and Sustainability, and a good opening lesson for a unit looking at recycling and waste.
 
Micah Albert has some other photographs which could also be used for this activity:

Other useful resources for exploring Dandora/Kenya and/or landfills/dumps:

• Dandora: Conflicting Views and Multiple Struggles
• ​Explore Dandora using Google Maps (satellite images and local photos)
• Google Arts and Culture - Search Kenya (Kenya Red Cross, GoDown Arts Centre and Vital Voices)
• Ben Curtis' photographs of Dandora
• The Guardian: Smelly, contaminated, full of disease: the world’s open dumps are growing
• The Guardian: The world's biggest and most dangerous dump sites  (interactive resource)
• African Slum Journal: Changing Faces of Dandora

All schools do units about recycling and waste, but they often don't look at the human stories involved - this activity and a focus on Dandora could be a great way to help students connect to this issue on an emotional level.