Spending the day today at MaRS with Cohort21 was another really powerful reminder of the positive unexpected consequences of getting together a diverse group of likeminded individuals to overcome their common paradoxes and dissimilarities.
Today, I discovered Pocket, a ‘read it later’ service that integrates more directly to all the different ways that I discover teacher-relevant information. Articles from email, posts from twitter, videos through Feedly — it can all collect in and organize in Pocket. Thanks, @teach_tomorrow.
I had a great conversation with @cohort21tim from Lakefield about his new passion for ThingLink and how it supports instructional strategies that help him achieve that R – the redefinition of his Bio labs. Do the dissection first and then refer to it all year long. Must remember to tell Laura at our school about it.
Chatted briefly with Shelley about her multiple hats and how difficult it is to have a focussed vision of teacher development when everything from software licensing to a new server room ends up on your plate. The York School has the clearest vision for their faculty tech development, but I don’t think that’s something I would like to see us impose, yet.
I’m a softy for tight community, and I get excited when I hear Laura Johnson talk about the Maben School’s iPads. I believe so strongly in the ability of a Smartboard to unify an elementary-level classroom and that iPads can interface so nicely with it, to allow students to participate in creating the activities they do. Grab an iPad, snap an album of objects that have rectangles, then gather and redistribute the photos for a writing project. Mmmm. But I’m definitely excited to share what we have learned introducing iPads and workflows into our junior school’s iPads, just as others have shared their hard-learned expertise with us.
For my action plan … I still need to hear what others are doing that feels like successful teacher development. I continue to struggle with what to call it, whether it is PD or Sessions or Workshops or PLNs. Even though I know that ‘if you build it, it will come’ isn’t always true, I know that provided a really targeted experience is effective at changing hearts and minds. I want to hear more about those…