I love the fact that, even as we make the run up to the Christmas Break, the blogs are still active. There was lots of great reading recently and even a special mention. Please take some time to visit these excellent articles from Ontario Bloggers. And, over the break, why not take a look at all that Ontario educational bloggers have to offer at the Live Binder or ScoopIT sites. If you are an Ontario education blogger and would like a personalized badge, read last week’s post and DM me to get one.
Bonus Post
Monica Batac isn’t an Ontario educator just yet. However, she does hang around with a bunch of us and is not shy in sharing her thoughts and opinions on important educational things. She is very insightful and is going to make a dynamic classroom teacher one day.
Joe Bower posted his thoughts about his not liking the Edublog Awards. Without stated criteria, etc., part of the concern is that it can become a popularity contest among many other things. So, Monica’s asking “WHY, WHY, WHY?”
I think that people blog within their own comfort zone. I’m fearful that if people blog for awards that it misses the point. If you’re a winner, or even nominated, you get a badge for your blog. But, don’t we all have badges in education that are more of consequence in our BMaths, PhDs, OCTs, etc.? The sad part about the fallout from Joe’s original post is that the 41 replies that are there have become pretty devisive among good educators. It’s one thing to start an intellectual discourse but quite another when the comments get posted at the personal level.
Consultants and Special Assignment Teachers
Brenda Sherry is all excited about using QR Codes in a Grade 4 classroom. She starts out by indicating that both her and the teacher she’s pairing with don’t know great deal about this. That’s awesome. Sounds like a perfect opportunity to do some co-learning with the students so that everyone walks away from the project wiser. It’s not just technology for technology sake. She’s already identifying opportunities for critical thinking and planning with the students. I hope that she continues to share the progress on this project.
Trustees and Higher Education
Uh oh. We have a less than enthusiastic Apple fan now in Joan Vinall-Cox. It seems to me that she’s set some sort of new record for setting up an iPad 2. 12 days! Wow. You hate to hear of people having problems like this. You’re just supposed to plug it in and away it goes.
I recently had a problem with my own iPad 2. All of a sudden, the home button stopped working. Then, it started to work intermittently. It was only then that I realized how much that little button at the bottom controls so much of what you do. A short term fix was to turn on the accessibility mode so that you could use the virtual home button on the screen. Of course, it overlays what I really wanted to tap on the screen and so I was forever moving it around. But, it was a short term fix. I called Apple support because it was under warranty and they did replace it. I love technology and enjoyed watching it travel, putting in loads of kilometres getting here. UPS was good enough to FourSquare the path for me as it left Pennsylvania for Kentucky for Mount Hope and then to Essex County.
But, it did get here and I’ve restored from backup and it seems to be working so nicely — just have to go through and reconfigure everything again. I hope that Joan’s 12 day ordeal wasn’t in vain and that she’s happily using her iPad and Apple Store now and continues without problems.
K-12 Educators
You’ve got to be careful what you blog about. In this case, Stephanie cured the December blahs by taking a SMART Board workshop. Maybe this will become part of SMART’s marketing package? Probably not, but what could make it is the excitement of rethinking her lessons to make them more interactive and engaging for the students. That sounds positive. Hopefully the workshop has given her all kinds of ways to engage students and not just using it as what I call a modern day drive-in theatre. This should be good to follow.
If she’s lucky, here students will take to it with enthusiasm and help her flatten any learning curve.
Principals, VPs, and Administrators
Principal David Garlick is asking for some assistance. He has a school that has some issues with students who move out and then move back. In the post, he talks about one way of welcoming the student back “home” and that is to give them the same locker that they had previously vacated. What a way to welcome a student back and to say that you welcome him/her presence. He’s looking for more ideas. If you’ve got one, give his blog a read and reply. Any idea would receive consideration – I mean, who would have thought of preserving a locker? Give him a hand.
The entire list of Ontario Educators on Twitter (or at least the ones that I know of) is available here.
