{"id":137,"date":"2016-11-14T23:01:34","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T23:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/elissagelleny\/?p=137"},"modified":"2016-11-14T23:01:34","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T23:01:34","slug":"blog-3-0-episode-1-channelling-our-inner-teacher-champion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/elissagelleny\/2016\/11\/14\/blog-3-0-episode-1-channelling-our-inner-teacher-champion\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog 3.0 – Episode 1: Channelling our Inner Teacher Champion"},"content":{"rendered":"

ATTENTION<\/span>:<\/strong> Please note that this blog post was started a week ago\u2026\u00a0I have had many learning moments over the past week while getting back into blogging, and I have greatly enjoyed the hours I have spent contemplating, researching and generally (or in some cases, specifically) reflecting upon what it means to be a \u2018teacher\u2019, where I hope we look to head with our mindset shifts, and how we engage with our students and fellow colleagues. That said, I have also learned that it makes more sense to break a blog post into several more manageable posts so that the timeliness is just that\u2026 timely! Advice I’ll adopt between this post and my next… \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

From last Monday morning\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

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As I sat on the GO Train this morning on my way to what will undoubtedly be more than an interesting and memorable 3 days at SAS Canada\u2019s HQ in downtown Toronto, I thought about Seth Godin\u2019s most recent blog<\/a>, \u201cThe next one or the last one?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

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(You too can start loving his blog like I do by clicking here<\/a>! His previous one to that was also pretty cool – about why candidates hope you won\u2019t vote at all<\/a>) and then said to myself,<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m making a choice, a choice to do something \u2018special\u2019 and not just good enough to get me through the days.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I feel like this statement (which, as an anecdotal aside, I pretty much said aloud while on the aforementioned GO Train\u2026 poor 1st year uni student cramming for his GMS midterm\u2026) could be the mantra for any forward-thinking, innovative and engaged facilitator, and I think it also sums up the Cohort21 experience: we make choices as educators to consistently seek out new and often exciting\/challenging opportunities that force us out of the repetitive potentially just \u2018good enough\u2019 routine Seth hones in on in his blog. When we challenge ourselves (by choice), we grow. And when we grow, we shift our mindset\u2026 and once that mindset is-a-shifting, well then the world can shift too. Pretty exciting stuff for an early-morning GO Train ride!<\/p>\n

So, when I arrived at SAS Canada with the IT crew, and well before it was technically open, I decided to make my second choice of the day\u2014to follow-through on my first new actionable for the 2016-17 season<\/strong>\u2014to blog (anyone who joined us for the first TwitterChat of the season last week knows that I made that commitment public – and I will be blogging weekly for the foreseeable future).<\/p>\n

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ASIDE<\/span>: For anyone out there who is not familiar with SAS Canada<\/a> (and don\u2019t worry if you fit that category – neither was I until a couple of years ago), it is a company dedicated to developing statistical analysis systems\/software (hence the acronym SAS) and then solving data-related problems for companies (aka clients). I first heard about SAS when I got involved with STEM Fellowship\u2019s Big Data Challenge for High School Students. This competition gifts secondary students with the opportunity to work with, manipulate and analyze sets of data – BIG data. For anyone unfamiliar with the term \u2018big data\u2019 (same disclaimer applies about this as my earlier one for SAS), check out this site<\/a> which has a fairly comprehensive explanation about what defines big data via the SAS US website, or this site<\/a> which comes courtesy of SearchCloudComputing (Hint: it\u2019s not the font size!).<\/p>\n

So, one might ask, if blogging is your new actionable, what are you current ones all about?<\/p>\n

If asked, I might say:<\/p>\n

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  1. Action Point 1:<\/strong> Increasing and improving the meaningful nature of PD at my school (this was tied to my original action plan from my first year in Cohort21)\n