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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Solving Interesting Problems
What interesting problems have you posed to students recently? What interesting problems have students asked you? Yesterday I was listening to Tim Ferriss interview Seth Godin on his 4 Hour Work Week podcast: ‘How Seth Godin Manages His Life — Rules, Principles, and Obsessions’. When I got to this quote, I noted the time on the show […]
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Transforming Our Classrooms – Ignite Presentation
Here is an Ignite presentation that I did in Delta on January 2oth, 2016, titled ‘Transforming Our Classrooms’. It is based on the presentation ‘7 Ways to Transform Your Classroom‘, but squeezed into less than 5 minutes, after I describe what our team has been working on at Inquiry Hub Secondary School over the last three and […]
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Projects that let students share their talents
I like when a project allows a student to share their talents. This is my daughter Katie’s project on the Muscular System (in French). I had fun helping her put together the video, but what I really enjoyed was watching her spend days working on the lyrics. I think Katie is the only one doing a […]
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Teaching comes with great power
Many attribute the quote: “With great power comes great responsibility” to Spiderman or more specifically his Uncle Ben. Stan Lee wrote the comic, and originally it showed up in a narrative caption. Actually before that, Winston Churchill said, “Where there is great power there is great responsibility…” and even before that: In 1817, member of British parliament […]
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How do you know when students are learning?
Yesterday after school I was in the hallway at Inquiry Hub, talking to a student about an idea he is launching with one of our teachers, iHub Talks. These talks, organized by students, will be presentations on diverse topics aimed to have appeal to a variety of students and community members. During the hallway conversation […]
