Written by I’m glad I’ve given myself a full day (and night*) before commenting on the first face-to-face session with Cohort 21 (*full disclosure: my husband said I was talking about Cohort 21 in my sleep last night!!)
Here are my impressions of a few things that were covered in yesterday’s session:
Garth and Justin launched right away into some examples of how technology can be used to gauge understanding of course material in real time during class.
Understoodit.com and polleverywhere.com can be used with laptops or mobile devices, can produce live survey results or word responses. 
What a great paperless update for the exit card strategy!
Rethinking Action Research:
I like that as we roll out our ideas, questions and plans this year, there will be media (twitter, blogs) to support real time feedback from our colleagues, instead of working in an isolated manner on a project.
Thinking <–> Sharing <–> Collaborating <–> Publishing= Cohort 21
I was introduced to diigo for social bookmarking and can’t wait to take it back to my colleagues!
And finally, you can now find me on Twitter (@jen_bibby). I am amazed at all the educational resources that are now at my fingertips!
Here’s what I’m most excited about in the upcoming weeks with Cohort 21:
- Coming away from face-to-face sessions with a fresh focus on teaching & learning and an ever-expanding toolkit for both short-term and long-term strategies
- Getting glimpses through the blogs and tweets of other members of the Cohort at what they’re doing in their classrooms and schools
- Being virtually surrounded by what seems like a very enthusiastic, professional and creative group of individuals who will provide great feedback and inspiration throughout the year
Talking about it in your sleep?! Clearly the session made quite the impression. It’s impressive to see you leveraging the tools of WordPress so readily to make your blog attractive, useful to others, and effective to read. You’re applying what you’ve learned in a very impressive way already!
It is great to be learning with you again #lessonstudy!
Thanks for a great first post,
garth.
Hi Garth,
It’s funny you mentioned #lessonstudy. I’m contemplating introducing the practice (which I loved being part of at GCS) AND having it segue into our departmental goal of going deeper with authentic assessment this year (the lesson centres around a performance task). Are people still devoting this much time to friendly critique of each others’ practice or have you found a better way to get the (in-depth) conversation rolling? I fear the time-factor a bit, since it’s not a voluntary meeting as ours were so it’s quite a commitment! Your feedback would be much appreciated 🙂