Shifting Paradigms – Moving away from Pair-a-Dimes

Interested in Pairadimes.com, Pairadimes.net, and/or Pairadimes.org? All 3 domains available. Contact @datruss on most socials. TLDR: I’m not publishing any more posts on my Pair-a-Dimes blog… But I write a short daily blog (1-3 minute reads) here: Daily-Ink. If you are a Pair-a-Dimes email subscriber, I’d be honoured if you subscribed to Daily Ink. To […]

Choice time for teacher Pro-D

Last Friday I had a Pro-D, Professional Development Day, with the Inquiry Hub staff. We started the morning with a book talk, sharing what we have learned from books we are reading. A few weeks ago, I had my teachers fill out a form sharing the title and link to a book that they wanted […]

How do we get to ‘YES’?

I watched this Peter Hutton TEDx talk tonight and more than one part struck a very familiar chord with me and the things we do at Inquiry Hub. The part of the talk I want to discus is this one: “We have a saying that ‘Yes is the default’. So, the firth thing about that […]

Just shifting online or shifting the learning?

Across the globe schools are closing due to Covid-19 and the learning is being moved online. I recently shared in my Daily-Ink post, ‘Novel ideas can spread from a novel virus‘: Discussion about the possibility of remote learning invites questions about blended learning where some of the work, both asynchronous and synchronous, is done remotely. […]

Adopting tools in a transformative rather than additive way

Years ago I was doing a presentation to high school educators and things didn’t go as planned: I started my presentation and within 30 seconds the power went out. I picked up my laptop and said to the 100+ audience members, “Ok, everybody gather around here.” ? I started a conversation about ‘What tech tool […]

Harnessing the Power and Potential of Social Media to Build Learning Communities #CDNedtech19

I’ve been invited to host a Round Table Breakout Session at the 10th Canadian EdTech Leadership Summit today, titled: “Harnessing the Power and Potential of Social Media to Build Learning Communities.” The invitation was born out of a Podcast I did with conference organizer Robert Martellacci @MindShareLearn, where we discussed my free ebook, Twitter EDU. […]

Teacher as compass

I love the metaphor of ‘Teacher as compass’; helping students navigate their own learning journey. Last night I read this tweet from Will Richardson: Kids don't need to be taught how to learn. (No one does.) Our job in schools is to create conditions where they can practice what they already know. To trust their […]

Rebirth of my daily blog

In July, I decided to (re)start my daily blog, coined Daily-Ink. At the time of my original attempt, I was a regular reader of Stephen Downes OLDaily, and a fan of one of my student’s blog name Wandering Ink. Thus ‘Daily-Ink’ seemed a good name. So what prompted the rebirth of my daily blog? I […]

Inquiry Hub Secondary School – Confluence and Influence

The following was written to be shared as part of our application to the Cmolik Prize for the Enhancement of Public Education in BC. It is an exploration into the ways in which our model has ‘fit’ nicely with the new BC Curriculum, and to share some of the influence that we have had in our […]

4 Thoughts about Pink Shirt Day

Yesterday was Pink Shirt Day. The initiative started in 2007 in Nova Scotia when, “David Shepherd, Travis Price and their teenage friends organized a high-school protest to wear pink in sympathy with a Grade 9 boy who was being bullied [for wearing a pink shirt]…[They] took a stand against bullying when they protested against the […]