I firmly believe that “It takes a community to raise a child” and so without cooperation and communication between a school and their parent community, ‘we’ cannot fully support our children and their learning. That said, I often wonder about how we can more meaningfully engage parents in a way that they want to be […]
Author: David Truss
Parenting in the digital age
Three weeks ago I did a couple presentations to parents about Parenting In the Digital Age: This FREE workshop is for parents, both the tech savvy and the less technically inclined, who would like to develop family expectations around the use of technology to play, learn and connect. For this presentation I created a wiki: […]
One last time
Here is a little slide show of me in one of my ‘roles of a principal‘: Ball-retriever. Before I got into administration, my good friend Dave Sands always used to say, “Being an elementary school principal is like being a rock star in a boy-band“… I got the first taste of that two weeks into […]
Congratulations on being duped
Congratulations edublogger, you’ve been duped! Here is a wonderful badge to put on your website. Now all you have to do is link back to our website and you get to share this wonderful badge on your blog. That’s right, all it costs is a link to our site where we advertise college degrees or […]
Who Owns the Learning?
I found a really handy tool recently: blogbooker.com “BlogBooker produces a high-quality PDF Blog Book from all your blog’s entries and comments.” I then took the pdf and archived it on Scribd, Slideshare, and a fun (but not-so-convenient) reader called Youblisher. Bookblogger numbers links and adds them at the end of posts and does a […]
Leadership in the digital age
This was sent to me by a good friend and mentor, (and a leader in his district). It refers to news about my school moving to a BYO Laptop program. The humour in it is that he lives in Canada and I’m in China… beyond that it speaks volumes about how important school level leadership […]
Bring Your Own Laptop to School
Background In the past two weeks I’ve moved from a school with just 3 projectors in a 4 floor, (no wireless), school to a school with: • Projectors in every classroom (that we will be using next school year). • Netbooks for every teacher. • Wireless in key rooms and common areas. AND… • Beginning […]
Photosynthesis and Learning: a learning metaphor
A few weeks back I was in a Grade 9 class that was working on Lit Circles. The conversation progressed to the teacher asking, “So why do we do lit circles?” The first student to answer said, “To get an ‘A’.” I know the student well enough that I was able to interject and say, […]
Math can be beautiful!
It can also be oversimplified and boring and taught very poorly. A boy rides his bicycle for 30 minutes and he travels 7.5 kilometers. How far can he travel in 3 hours? If you do the (simple) math, with the three basic pieces of information given- an oversimplified strategy many math books employ, you’ll see […]
Shifting Attitudes
Have you made the Shift? Are you an agent of change? Where do you fit? This is Part III of a 3 part series. When I started this series I had an outline that I only vaguely ended up following, but I knew from the start that what I wanted to say was too much […]