Learning for/through/because of/by teaching.

This week has been a huge week.

I found myself waking up, and my first thought being 'I am so excited to hang out with my learners today'. I found myself coming home from school, and happily spending hours on planning, because I was so excited about their learning I couldn't stop myself.

I was working on this. 

Creating this site was so exciting for me. Is that nerdy to admit? I don't know, but I don't care.

We learnt how to make them on one of our digital immersion days, and have been taught little bits here and there of how to make them better. I was proud of my site and the planning I had done on it for my learners. I showed it to my mentor the next morning and she got excited too...

(and wanted to know how to make one too - teaching point for me!). She also left me an encouraging comment on the bottom of the site if you want to read it.

Then, at digital immersion today, we were shown how to insert invisible tables using HTML and how these make your site look better and also make it more adaptable on different devices, as photos, videos (etc.) are forced into place and can't shift around your web page. This is perfect for my learners who use netbooks, as their screen size is different to mine.

So then, I updated my site! It now has both WYSIWYG formatting and HTML formatting 

(I'm still learning! It won't be perfect just yet....)

My reflection on this site though is not about the formatting of my site, but how much learning has gone into it and come out of it.

Learning for teaching

I first learnt how to make a site to benefit my teaching skills and my learners.

Learning through teaching

I am continually learning what strategies, preferences, multimodal options (etc.) work best for my learners, when I am teaching them

Learning because of teaching

Teaching isn't static. It is always changing, and so my practice should be as well. As teachers we need to constantly be keeping up with 'the times' of effective/best practice, and using these digital tools is one of those things.

Learning by teaching

I am cementing my own learning by teaching these skills and knowledge to my mentor.

So many different types of learning and teaching, interlocked and intertwined, interdependent and interrelated. If that doesn't summarise being a teacher, I don't know what will.