Category: Teaching
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On Being Timeless
Recently, Anthony Salcito, Vice President of Education at Microsoft, gave an analogy during his talk at the E2 Educator’s Conference in Singapore, he said: “If you took a surgeon from a hunded years ago out if an operating theatre and put him or her in a hospital today they would be completely lost and not…
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Tweak It!
Katie Martin’s thoughts on tweaking learning experiences and the way we do things resonated with me this week, particularly as I am in the midst of doing just that. A couple years ago I asked my grade 11 English students what could be improved or changed in the course. What did they love? What impacted…
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Be Revolutionary: Focus on the People
There’s a revolution going on all around us. An innovation revolution. And an innovation revolution is just what we need to support our students and ourselves. If we truly want to do the best for our students we have to innovate. Teaching the way we were taught isn’t going to cut it anymore. We need to…
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Innovative Messages
What messages are you sending? Let’s consider the messages we send when we innovate in the classroom. We show our students that learning is ongoing, a process and something to embrace – always. Innovation enhances everything we do. It makes life interesting. It creates passion. It’s contagious. But most importantly it says we think enough…
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Opportunities Abound Outside Your Comfort Zone
Have you ever looked around at teachers you admire and wondered “How do they do that? How do they have so much energy? It’s like cool opportunities just fall in their lap!” I used to think like that. Then I discovered something… opportunities don’t fall in people’s laps. People work for them. And that energy?…
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The Seven ‘One’ders of OneNote
I’m sure you’ve heard of the Seven Wonders of the World… Wonders of the Ancient World: Colossus of Rhodes Great Pyramid of Giza Hanging Gardens of Babylon Lighthouse of Alexandria Mausoleum at Halicarnassus Statue of Zeus at Olympia Temple of Artemis at Ephesus NEW Wonders: Great Wall of China Petra Christ the Redeemer Machu Picchu…
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Bikes, Balance & Gravity
“Look at him go! I think he’s got the hang of it!” “Hmm, maybe not quite yet.” It was the umpteenth time my son had fallen that day learning to ride his bike, but it looked like the frustration was getting to him at this point as I watched him get up and give his…
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So Many Silver Linings
This past week I had the pleasure of co-hosting a TweetMeet with some of my fellow Digital Lead Learners @GEDSB21C: Teaching in the Cloud, in collaboration with #MSFTEdChatCA and I have to say, it underscores what a powerful tool Twitter can be — truly to my amazement. Let me explain… It wasn’t so long ago…
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The Long Dark Days of November
“The Long Dark Days of November” was actually an agenda topic at our most recent staff meeting. The general conversation surrounded how many of us, especially our students, may be feeling at this time of year. My principal outlined a couple things to think about – it’s midterm so many students may be disheartened because…
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Moments to Find Your People and Your Beat
The Elusive Perfect Moment from The Educator’s Sandbox (theedsandbox) was the first blog post I read in IMMOOC. It was also the moment that I knew I was hooked. ‘This person TOTALLY gets Me’ is all I could think as I read. I too have been gripped by fear of ‘doing it wrong’. I’m so glad that…
