Microsoft Global Forum: Day 1

On Tuesday, our day started with 7AM Team Canada breakfast, followed by conference registration and team pictures!

 

 Photo credit: Kate Taylor

Next, we set up our Little Hands Extended display. Our brand new Microsoft Surfaces were waiting for us at our booth!

We attended the team building session with Tracy Immel.  This was an opportunity to meet our "Learn-a-Thon" teams and work with them on a group activity.  We then had professional development sessions that helped us learn to use our Surfaces and gave us some ideas for using them in the classroom.

Our Little Hands Extended exhibit was open from 2:45-6:30 and one of our judges visited our booth to find out more about our project and evaluate it based on the 21st century learning rubrics.  It was a very busy afternoon of meeting and reconnecting with teachers, principals, Microsoft staff, sponsors and judges.  We really enjoyed sharing our students' great work and we received lots of positive feedback on their great action plans - way to go Kindergartens and Grade 1s!  A big highlight was when Microsoft's Vice President for Education,  Anthony Salcito, stopped by our display!

After exhibits closed, we had a short break and then returned to the conference center for the welcome reception.  We met up with many people we'd met at previous forums and also made some great new connections.  One of the best parts of this event is meeting people from around the world who are passionate about improving and changing education.  We had some great conversations and learned a lot! We even got to chat with one of our favorite keynote speakers from the 2012 Forum, Simon Breakspear and behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert, who works for Bing. 

Day 2 in Barcelona

We wanted to experience more of Barcelona, so we took a big walk on Monday once we were better rested. We saw many beautiful buildings, historical places and went on a food tour.  Our favorite area was the Gothic Quarter. We got lots of exercise and had a lovely day! 

 The Gothic Quarter - beautiful narrow streets with lovely buildings!

Placa Reial

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The first stop on our food tour.  

 We were really brave and tried several new foods!

The yuckiest thing we ate was cold anchovies flavored with vinegar and oil

We enjoyed a variety of meats, cheeses and breads.

We walked around the Gothic Quarter during our food tour and got to see many more sights in this interesting area!

The most delicious part was eating gelato for dessert!  It was very creamy and delicious!

We've Arrived!

Mrs. Devon Caldwell and I were selected to be a part of Team Canada at this year's Microsoft Global Forum.  We are in Barcelona, Spain for the week for this special event, which focuses on recognizing innovative teachers and schools, providing relevant professional development and improving learning for students around the globe.  We will be working with educators from many different countries and we are so excited to share the Little Hands Extended project - we are very proud of our students' work and we always enjoy showing their learning to others! 

 Although we love to have coordinating outfits, we did NOT plan our matching black and purple traveling outfits.  Starbucks at the Winnipeg Airport was a must, since we are both big fans of their lattes. 

It was a long journey to get here.  We traveled 2.5 hours from Winnipeg to Toronto, then boarded a very long 7.5 hour flight from Toronto to Frankfurt.  Next, we had to wait about 3 hours in Frankfurt, which was really hard since we were so sleepy (Mrs. Caldwell even had to have a nap).  Finally, we boarded our last flight to Barcelona, which was about another 2 hours long.  We were so exhausted that we slept soundly for our last flight and were ready to see the sights when we got to Barcelona!

We checked in at our hotel and were excited to have a view of the sea from our tenth floor room. 

Next, we went to explore Barcelona.  We walked around and then decided to take a bus tour.  We got to sit on the top floor of the double decker bus, which was really fun.  We got to see lots of the city from the bus.  We decided to get off the bus and go for a walk at Park Guell. It is a lovely, green park and we were excited to enjoy warmer weather here (16C).  You can climb up the hills in the park to get a great view of the city. 

Energy Diet Challenge

Here are our trackers from our first challenge Do you really need it?   Everyone tracked their energy consumption and agreed to give up 1 energy-consuming "want" for 4 days to help save energy!

And as a side note, I guess I was hoping it was a leap year because I typed "February 29th" on our trackers instead of March 1st!   Ooops!  I only realized this once I'd already uploaded everything :(

View all

Get your own

Olympic Project Reflections

It feels a bit sad to be finishing up our Olympics project, but I was really pleased to read my students' reflections and see the many things they learned and enjoyed!

The Emperor's Egg

Today we read The Emperor's Egg by Martin Jenkins.  Before we read, we listed some things we knew/thought we knew about penguins:

What we know about penguins:

• they eat fish
• macaroni penguins have yellow on their heads
• penguins lay eggs
• penguins can swim
• they live in Antartica
• penguins have to keep their eggs warm
• they live at the north pole

As we read, we kept track of new information we learned:

• when the chick is big enough, the parents leave it alone and go fishing
• when baby penguins are 4 months old, they can look after themselves boy Emperor penguins are about 4 feet tall and females are smaller
• Emperor penguins are the biggest in the world
• Emperor penguins eat squid, fish, krill
• female penguins lay eggs
• female penguins spend most of the winter in the water, eating a lot
• the father has to stay with the egg
• he has to make sure the egg stays warm or else the chick will die
• they put the egg on their feet and tuck it under their tummy
  they sit on their egg for two months until it hatches
• she lays the egg in May or June, which is the start of winter in Antarctica 
• the father penguin doesn't get anything to eat while he's egg-sitting, that's like us not eating breakfast or lunch or dinner or snacks
• they huddle to stay warm
  they have fat under their skin to keep warm
• if a spot is very slippery, penguins slide on their tummies but they are careful not to bump into each other because they still have the eggs with them
• when the dad penguin goes sliding, sometimes the egg rolls out and breaks
• one day the egg will crack open 
• when the baby chick hatches, the Dad penguins has 2 jobs: keep it warm and feed it
  a penguin chick is very small
• the dad has a pouch to milky stuff to feed the baby until the mom comes home
• each penguin has their own sound
• the chick can make a whistling sound
• the mom penguin spits food into the baby's mouth and it looks yucky but the baby needs it 

I was very impressed with the many facts that students summarized - it forms quite an impressive list!  

Classroom Energy Diet: Do you really need it?

I received an email about the Classroom Energy Diet Challenge earlier this year.  Since my students have choices about their project learning each year, I asked students if they'd be interested taking part.  After some discussion, we decided that we'd sign up for the challenge.  The challenge began as we were in the midst of our Olympics project, so we are just getting started with our challenges now.  K-12 students across the country are working to increase energy awareness and we are excited to be a part of this work!   I hope you will follow us on our journey.

Our first challenge, called Do you really need it?, is currently underway.  We learned about needs versus wants and discussed some of the things we use that require energy.  Students are now tracking their energy use for 3 days and identifying needs vs. wants in terms of their energy consumption.  Next, students have agreed to give up one energy-consuming "want" for 4 days in order to save energy.  We will share our tracking once we've completed this challenge.  If you'd like to join this activity, please download the tracker here and adjust it to fit your needs.  We'd love to hear about your learning activities and energy-saving changes!