With only a little more than two months of school left, the to-do list seems to be getting longer and longer. That is because this June will see more than the end of a school year; it will also see the end of our school…as we know it, that is….
As mentioned before, a new school is being built on what used to be the playground and the original building will come down sometime over the summer (if all goes as planned). I am currently involved with the closing ceremonies committee and we are planning a ‘big event’ during the first week of June. The typical open house associated with Education Week has been postponed until the evening of the closing ceremonies and classes are to design their displays for the evening around the theme: Thanks for the Memories.
One of my duties on the committee is to create an invitation that will be sent to select ‘dignitaries’ from the Board and the community. The principal thought that it would be nice to have student art on the front of the invitations. I agreed that it was a good thought, but the logistics and short time line would make it difficult to realize. I have to admit, I was also a little worried about printing off 100 invitations and just passing them out to kids to draw on the front. No offence intended, but there would be no control over what type of artwork we would get back. So time for Plan B.
A huge juxtaposition between the old school and the new school is technology. Rundown and resource deprived will miraculously turn into shiny and new techno-mania. I thought I should work this concept into the creation of the invitations somehow. Digital cameras were given the school leadership group (6 Grade 5 and 6 students in a precursor to the student government that will be developed once we are a full JK to 8 school). The students were instructed to take pictures of the building and things in it, but not people. Using cameras and computers (‘new’ technology) we will create and print invitations that depict the very reason we are moving into a new building….the deterioration of the old one.
All I can say is ‘WOW’…..the students did an amazing job with the cameras. The angles! The content! The compositions! The photos exhibit the amazing things that are happening in the school as well as the condition of the building and resources we are working with every day. Every picture does tell a story. We will go through the images next week and decide which ones we would like to use. I am creating a template for the invitation and we crop and drop the photos into place. I can’t guarantee that every invitation will be unique, but they will definitely be a large variety. It is quiet exciting for the group and for me so see this idea come to fruition.
The group is also going to create a slideshow for the evening showcasing photos from the past 46 years. They are in the process of choosing music from the past four decades to create a soundtrack for the presentation and will be scanning old photos into folders on the computer over the next two weeks. Even with limited resources, we are making use of technology to generate both printed and electronic creations for our closing ceremonies.
These are very visual products of technology. My teaching partner and I were recently discussing how ‘visual’ teaching has become these days. Our classrooms are filled with anchor charts and samples of student work. We incorporate the SMARTboard when we can access it and use illustrations, charts and videos to supplement our lessons. These strategies are great in the classroom because they help us reach so many students. Even those students who are not specifically ‘visual learners’ will still benefit from these types of resources. Most students that is….My teaching partner will have a student in her classroom next year who is completely blind. When we have become so accustomed to visual resources, how can we fully include a blind student into the classroom? With the technology that will be available to her next year, there will surely be devices and techniques to benefit both her and the student….but what are they? As I have pointed out, even the technology we currently are using is very visual based. So now that we are getting more comfortable with visual technology….on with the audio!
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