It is very risky to choose not to take risks. Thought 1. You can’t look at averages when everyone isn’t moving. When some people are doing amazing things and others have done nothing new, measuring the average tells us absolutely nothing. Everyone needs to be moving in the right direction, and when someone is standing still, […]
Category: pairadimes
“Learn to live with ambiguity.”
am·bi·gu·i·ty noun • uncertainty or inexactness of meaning in language. synonyms: vagueness, obscurity, abstruseness, doubtfulness, uncertainty; • a lack of decisiveness or commitment resulting from a failure to make a choice between alternatives. Ambiguity has potential to be a catalyst to new learning. It can be the spark to kindle lateral thinking and creative solutions to huge problems […]
Share:
Creating the time and space for self-directed, personalized, inquiry learning.
Background (Part 1 – Purpose) The following image and description were created for an application for an award. ‘Assignments’ like this are great because they force us (teachers John Sarte, Alan Soiseth and myself) to think about what it is we value, and strive towards as we build our program at Inquiry Hub Secondary School. […]
Share:
The Unconference
I have to admit, that I’ve avoided edcamps and unconfernces for a while, because they have felt to me like group hugs… warm and cozy, but not a lot about moving my learning forward. However, I participated in the Institute for Innovation in Education (iiE) conference at Vancouver Island University this pass weekend and the afternoon of […]
Share:
3 Questions Before Supporting Innovation
1. Is this best for students and their learning? 2. Is this scalable? 3. Are you willing to share? In a conversation with my good friend, Dave Sands, we were talking about the challenge of investing in systematic change vs supporting the outliers (and the Lone Wolves). There will always be limited resources to work with, and […]
Share:
Relevance Amplifies Learning
Last year two grade 11 students, Josh & Brandon, started creating an app using iBeacon technology to help our teachers take attendance. A year later, that app is not completed, it probably won’t be completed any time soon, and yet this is one of a number of very successful projects that happened last year. The plan […]
Share:
Questioning Your Inquiry
As educators, we often refer to ‘Wait Time’ as the time between when you ask a question and when you expect an answer. Cast out a question to your class and if you don’t provide wait time, then when the first student begins to answer (takes a bite), all your other students are ‘off the […]
Share:
17,000 Emails
17,000+ emails in a year. That’s not a guess, that’s how many emails I had in my inbox for one calendar year. That doesn’t include a few hundred deleted items. It also doesn’t include emails to my gmail account… 17,000+ is a total for just my work email. Excluding holidays and weekends, that’s about 85 emails […]
Share:
Critical Questions
I was recently at my first ISTE Conference, and more than any session that I attended, what I really loved was connecting face-to-face with amazing educators that I only ever get to connect with online. These are amazing people! Some I’ve met once or twice before, but others, like Kathleen McClaskey, Barbara Bray and Shelly […]
Share:
You are not in the trenches
I do not know of a time in history when ‘being in the trenches’ conjured a pleasant image? Yet in the past few weeks I’ve heard teaching referred to a number of times that way. I’ve made this reference before, but not for a long time now, and that has been intentional. Like I mentioned in […]
