Pineapples innovating Education through Technology?

Recently, I was sitting in a PD session with my campus, and my academic coordinator gave a brief introduction to this new hashtag that has taken Twitter by storm. Obviously this stirred an interest for me, anything with technology and education is a new way to start of research for me now, especially when it comes from innovative minds.

So what is #observeme?

Well it all started with a Pineapple..

Did you know that pineapples are a traditional expression of " Welcome" like " Welcome to My Home".

The facts you learn through research and your PD session.

This small significant detail started a trend on Twitter called #observeme. If you go through the #observeme feed, you will see educators with Pineapple Charts, calendars of when it's appropriate for teachers on their campus to come sit in their rooms and observe their lessons.

How magical a fruit can revolutionize teaching!

Observations have always intrigued me as a teacher, mostly because I have spent time having my mentor in my early years of teaching ( Can I call it early years of teaching if I've only been teaching for 6 years?) observe me to help me grow as a teacher and then having my new academic coordinator videoing my teaching to help me reach educational goals.

When I watch myself, I know how to critique myself but when I watch others, I forgot that I, too, must include myself when observing them.

My thoughts have to reflect how can I utilize what they do in my content, or how can I handle a difficult student with ease like them.

These are thoughts and reflections that teachers need in order to grow as educators and learners.

My growth mindset has learned that with any profession that there is always an opportunity to learn in order to build skills.

Our school is actually developing our own #observeme through what they call TOTs (Teachers Observing Teachers). We post on our calendar in our workroom what concepts we practicing from Kagan to incorporating technology into the classroom.

This allows us to create a better communication on what is going on in our classes.

The coolest part is we are creating QR codes that lead to a Google form that they can fill out for us to help us grow a teachers.

My form includes my goals of

1. Announcing the type of questioning I am going to be using

2. Closing my lesson

3. Feedback on goals that I could create for myself or need to work on.

It will be interesting how we move from our TOTs calendar to #observeme post on our Twitter accounts. Maybe one of us will have to be first to move that transition for our school. This will be an exciting adventure this year.