Danielle Emmons EDT563 Blog

 For this Raising the Question assignment, I looked at Emily Franzke's brainstorming post. I connected to it because we had done the same warm up activity for our brainstorm post and we both have how might we questions centered around difficulties teaching in covid times. I also found it interesting that while we both did opposite and analogy thinking, she preferred analogy over opposite, while I found opposite to be easier. I am mainly using email, and send out newsletters every Friday. I don't typically get any responses from parents about the newsletter though, so I'm unsure if they are being read or not. We also just had our first round of conferences virtually. When thinking about communicating with parents, the biggest challenge is always finding the time and getting response.  My questions to Emily are: A re your students currently in person, remote or a mixture of both? W hat types of communication are you using right now? Are you having conferences this year? If so...

  The three principals I took away from the readings are: Gather inspiration, Share your work, Think Bigger. No matter what project you are working on or problem you are trying to solve, I think these are universal and essential steps. For me gathering inspiration on my problem comes from talking to other teachers and students, researching online and reading blogs/post from other teachers. Sharing my work is mostly done through informal conversations with other colleagues. Recently, I have been sharing work through this blog which has been new to me, but also enjoyable. Like Kleon said, even sharing something small can be big. Thinking bigger for me is a mindset to always be growing and evolving. Once you think your work is done or your problem is solved, brainstorm with others, gather new information and self reflect. See how your work can change and become inspiration for someone else. 

After reading the two readings, I have a lot of take aways that I think will help me with my design problem and with problems in the future. In Lupton, it emphasizes the importance of getting to know your users. An important feature of this is to observe them and to gather insight about their interests. When you want to understand someone, these are two really important ways to learn more about a person. Observation allows you to see things that they aren't telling you, or may not know how to tell you. Learning about their interests helps you create a solution that will truly work for them and that they will enjoy. In creative confidence, I really enjoyed reading about the real life examples they provided. It gave me a better understanding of what each aspect really meant. I like how it mentioned you have to decide to be creative and take risks. Being creative doesn't always come naturally to people and so something it really does come down to making the decision to try somethi...

For the warm up this week, I decided to make a to do list on sticky notes and then place them outside of the room. When I saw this as an option, I immediately felt like this is the warm up I should do. With teaching, course work and parent conferences next week, it's hard to not have my long to do list on my mind constantly. I found that it was helpful to do this because I now have the important things I must do written down, out of my head and even out of the room! It was a low prep warm up and I enjoyed it. I think there could be a way to adapt this to my classroom too. I was thinking I could have students write down a few things that are worrying them/ on their mind during our morning meeting. We could talk about them and then put them outside the classroom in a box or something. It would be interesting to try out. I tried both of the opposite thinking and analogy thinking to initiate my brainstorming phase. Each of them had their strong points. During the analogy thinking exerc...

For this weeks podcast, I listened to You 2.0 : The Empathy Gym. This was a particularly interesting podcast, because it centers around an actual scenario that a man placed on society. It was interesting and a bit shocking to hear how some people responded to this empathy experiment. During this podcast, some points really stuck out to me. At one point, one of the speakers was talking about his parents going through a divorce. He said that at first it was a struggle to understand each person and their different rules, but then he realized that his parents were hurting too. Once he realized that his parents were having a hard time with the divorce as well, it made it easier for him to understand them and connect with them. He realized what they were all going through wasn't that different. This stood out to me because I think a lot of time people, myself included, tend to get stuck on what is going on in our lives without realizing all of the other things happening in the lives o...

After receiving some feedback and thinking about what my problem statement was, I realized that I was working with two separate problems. I have decided to focus on the learner based problem rather than the teacher based problem. My problem statement is : “Students  need a way to  feel connected and safe with their classmates  because  mask wearing and social distancing prohibit them from interacting as they normally would/could . ” For this weeks post, I am going to write out some questions that I will be asking students during interviews.  Tell me about a time you felt really happy at school. Tell me about a time you really enjoyed an activity at school. When you think about wearing a mask and social distancing from your friends at school, how do you feel? Why? If you could change one thing about school, other than wearing a mask, what would it be? Why?