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 […]
Category: Learning Conversations
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Getting it right
When you work in a small, innovative school, you are always looking at the things that still need to be done. To use a sailing analogy, you are constantly tacking and maneuvering to adjust to the changing winds. This is easier to do in a ‘small ship’ and is often required to be done more […]
Community, Relationships and Rhizomatic Learning
I’m at the BC Digital Learning Conference in Burnaby BC. Yesterday I went to the pre-conference session ‘Beyond DL (Part 1) Emerging Models Integrating Distributed Learning in BC Schools’, a panel discussion with: Verena Roberts, Jeff Stewart, Brad Hutchinson, Dean Coder, Bruce Weitzel, Karen Flello, moderated by Randy LaBonte. A common theme inspired by Verena was the […]
Transforming Our Learning Metaphors #yvrignite
I made a sound recording of the presentation that I did at the Discovery Education YVR Ignite Session yesterday, and then I added the recording to my timed slides. This was an inspiring event, thank you to Dean Shareski for organizing it and providing me with the honour of presenting. I’ll have more to blog […]
Not Yet Blended Learning
There is a lot of talk these days about Blended Learning. However: “Increasing student opportunities to engage with technology — such as teachers using flipped classroom strategies, a school computer lab, and computers using digital curriculum in the classroom – are all steps in the right direction, but don’t meet the full potential of blended […]
Leading in a time of…
Anyone who regularly reads my blog would know that in the last year there are two key elements of leadership that I have been struggling with. The more current one involves the teacher dispute going on in BC and my sense of frustration and feelings of helplessness as I watch a good educational system suffer […]
Renaissance Revival
A couple weeks ago, I received an invite to a ‘Renaissance Fair‘ at a neighbouring Middle School. It was an honour to be invited, since the reason for the invite was that they based the fair on the model Don Gordon wrote about in the paper I linked to above. It was an even greater […]