So I had my Goals Meeting… it’s interesting how a conversation can change things.
Planning for my goals meeting provided a good chance to reflect on last year. In addition to my regular job of teaching students and supporting teachers, there were several large things that I worked on in 2015-16:
- Utilized a design thinking process to chair a committee to develop a Classroom Renewal plan
- Revised the K-7 ICT Philosophy
- Wrote Tech Standards for K-7
- Provided some MYP support about unit planning and teaching through inquiry
- Wrote book on teaching through Inquiry
- Started to explore ePortfolio platforms
- Helped roll over all student devices
This year I am planning to continue the following:
- Leading workshops related to Bold School book
- Moderating #pypchat every other Wednesday evening
- Supporting MYP teachers as they continue to explore teaching through inquiry
- Supporting Primary teachers as they trial ePortfolios
I settled on the following as my official goals:
| Utilize an ePortfolio platform for myself to document and reflect on my learning and growth |
| Communicate to parents the ‘vision to support mission’ we developed for ICT last year as part of the ICT Philosophy revision (including multiple classroom examples to celebrate what we already do) and work with teachers to implement this vision and inspire the use of technology as an object to think with |
| Figure out Managebac and it’s challenges/ opportunities for PYP unit planning, portfolios and reporting processes |
But… my really personal goal is to blog regularly. It seems so simple but I have taken so many stabs at blogging and none have stuck. I ham hoping that but putting this out there as an intended goal I will feel some peer pressure to actually accomplish this. I am looking to you to hold me accountable!
Inquiring Minds Want to Know:
- How do regular bloggers do it? How do you schedule your posts? Are they impromptu? Or do you have a set schedule or plan? How do you determine which topics you might blog about? I feel like there are a thousand ideas in my head and settling on just one to blog about it a challenge.
- I want to analyze the blogs I enjoy reading to see how they are written and how they are laid out.
Behind the Scenes:
To create the image above, I went to search.creativecommons.org and looked for “megaphone” images on flickr. I like to use this search because I can find images that are labelled for reuse as well as the associated source info.
I found Justin Norman. Anti-Torture Vigil – Week 18. 2010. CC-licensed (BY-NC-SA) via flickr.com Accessed Nov 7, 2016.
I downloaded the image above to my laptop and was about to add some text to it.
I then remembered that I had an app on my phone called Path On that would allow me to easily add text in an arc. I remembered. So I opened my flickr app and searched for the same image and saved it to my phone.
I then opened the Path On app and drew two arcs, added the text and adjusted the font, colour, etc.
It worked fairly well but because I created it on my phone and the image here is larger, it turned out a bit blurry. I wonder if I could have exported a better quality version?
I didn’t know you moderated the #pyp chat! That is awesome!
@snewell would really benefit from that as well as any other PYP teachers in the cohort.
Let’s let people know at the next F2F.
I would also love to read and learn all about your Bold Schools book.
Congratulations – that is quite an accomplishment.
Wow – those are some serious projects you’ve been a part of! I’d love to hear more about your book, as well.
As someone who really loved the blogging component to my involvement in Cohort 21 last year, I would say that for me, blogging was never scheduled. Of course, leading up to F2F sessions I would really try to blog, but I found my most authentic blog posts were the ones that simply addressed something that had been on my mind lately. While I’m walking the dogs in the morning I’m often mulling over events at school, reflecting on the previous day, and thinking about life and learning in general. That’s usually where and when my blog posts are born. And then I use a few spare minutes here and there to hack away at the idea and see if it turns into something.
I think that a key thing to keep in mind is that your blog posts do not all need to be 1000+ word masterpieces. Short reflections on something that you’ve been thinking about or questions on your mind that you just want some feedback about make really excellent posts as well. Just as we want our students to show HOW they got to a certain point, we can use blogging to do that for our own thinking! The ideas do not have to be fully formed to be worth exploring or expressing!
I’m looking forward to seeing you make your own thinking visible in this space this year!
Jen
I second everything from Jennifer above. I too am often coming up with great post ideas when I’m walking my dog or cuddling my baby, so lately I’ve just started a master list of ideas and when I have a free half hour or so, I just bang one out on Google Drive, save it, and then review it before I’m ready to publish.