I created this video in the same way I created Instructional Coach, via Garage Band, iMovie, and with my own photos and videos. This time I did not rap, and for this we are truly grateful. This video tells the story of my son’s Geranium adequately. What I did not put into the text was […]
Continued from the middle of the end of the beginning. I’ve blathered on for long enough, and I did it so you know that this went wrong a lot before it went okay. Even now, check the punctuation in my video’s text. It is laughable. Will I be an instructional coach at Rosseau Lake College? […]
Continued from the beginning of the end of the beginning. I was stuck with a screenshot of what I had created in Garage Band, and this did not capture the essence of the song I had written nor what my Cohort 21 action plan has thus far entailed. I thought about linking directly to the […]
Microsoft PowerPoint was first released in 1987 (Wikipedia, 2019a). The original slide deck software, PowerPoint revolutionized presentations everywhere, freeing us from the trials and tribulations of drawing, or even worse, photocopying, onto transparencies. As a testament to their significance in communication, the form and features of myriad slide deck programs remain similar to this day. […]
There is no great time to launch yet another initiative. After our second face-to-face we were in the throes of the pre-December rush, and it seemed like a bad time to start. After the winter break we were in the throes of gathering data for Semester 1 final reports, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of […]
Last year when I was teaching Chemistry 12 (SCH4U) I borrowed two of Aletheia’s (@edaigle) unused diapers with which to conduct an experiment. I even dissected one diaper to get ready for the experiment; then life moved on, time ran out, and the diaper strips sat in a beaker in a lab cupboard until today. […]
Have you ever gone away for the weekend and realized you owed some feedback to a student while you were gone? I am talking about the type of feedback that has to happen before Monday and not by 11 pm on Sunday night either. This just happened to me and thankfully the student submitted his […]
You might wonder if these two words, network and community, are not synonyms. People, together, the way they are supposed to be. Am I right? I am reading Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto (buy it), and Gatto is getting under my skin. At a scant 120 pages, some of which are postscripts, you […]
Once upon a time, Cheryl Bissonette (RLC’s Assistant Head of School) had a vision for what she called an end-of-semester ‘personalized week.’ Her exact words may very well have been: “What if we set up exam week so that students have a mix of required items, such as presentations and exams, and options such as […]
I love taking photos. As a teen I longed for my own camera, yet I had no money. I have none of my own photos from my time in high school. Once in university I bought a small point-and-shoot film camera. I would develop a roll of 24 photos to maybe get two or three […]
Now that I am back to blogging it seems that at some points during my day I am thinking through ideas for several blog posts at a time if I let my brain ‘flow.’ My recent thoughts for posts surround topics such as: Christmas feelings and what to do about them; How failing forward looks […]
It’s been a while since I last posted, and that is because there has been a lot going on! Schools get so busy in the final two weeks before the winter holidays, don’t they? If you haven’t yet done so, please do some square breathing: breathe in deeply for a two count, hold it for […]
If you are looking to add inquiry and innovation to programs within your sphere of influence you need this book. Inquiry and Innovation in the Classroom: Using 20% Time, Genius Hour, and PBL to Drive Student Success by A. J. Juliani (buy it) is both enlightening and instructive for the important work of giving students […]
I have had some fun this week using an Apple program called Preview. Aptly named, this is the program that runs if you double click on a file to look at it. There is a little blue pen tip icon under the file title that is available with most file types. When you hover over […]
I am leading a photography club during the winter trimester at Rosseau Lake College. The premise is simple: I issue a challenge each week and each student attempts to meet the challenge, either during one of our times together or at some other moment during the week. It’s pretty loose, and the point is to […]
How might we develop an instructional coaching program that supports learning, nurtures teachers, and honours the needs of the school? I can’t find the rest of my workbook at this time. I am glad to have found this page, the most important one, with my corrected wording and post-it note feedback intact. I have attended […]
We ran our first real lab today. I decided within the first block, a spare period for me, that it was time and that they were ready. “Ready for what,” you ask? Ready to handle acidic (hydrochloric acid) and basic (sodium hydroxide) substances with enough care and professionalism so as not require a trip to […]
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink (buy it) was released nearly ten years ago in 2009. I first learned about it from educators on Twitter and it was one of my summer reads in 2015. If you want to know where I took what I learned from it back when […]
I am a chemistry and biology teacher. I love the endless real puzzles to solve that are on offer through a combination of the periodic table of the elements and a variety of chemical quantities. I love living things, observing the nature around me, and connecting processes and systems. I seriously never get bored of […]
I woke up this morning thinking about Conference of Independent Schools schools. Aside from knowing that CIS exists and that Cohort 21 is for CIS Ontario educators I felt rather ignorant overall, so I made coffee and sat down to do some data mining. We have been given a Cohort 21 WordPress account for blogging, […]
having the opportunity to connect with other Ontario educators and hearing about their triumphs and struggles. Now I know they are not so different from my own. I had more time to compare teaching notes by chatting face-to-face with other Ontario educators. Everyone is concentrating on writing. if it is possible to have a face-to-face […]
When you are working as part of a team you are most often working on something that isn’t entirely for yourself. If you are part of a team of educational professionals you are probably also working on something that is considered to be a part of your job description and it goes without saying that […]