doug — off the record

just a place to share some thoughts


This Week in Ontario Edublogs

There was some great reading from Ontario Edublogs this week.  Here’s a sampling of what caught my eye….

To a Higher Level

We were just talking about this at supper.  Why is it always that the lead stories are doom and gloom?  I pointed my wife to Paul Cornies’ blog post from the morning and, in particular, to a quotation from Russell Baker.

Reporters thrive on the world’s misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.  ~ Russell Baker

Paul had a great bunch of media related quotes for this posting – so good!


Why DO I protest? I am looking beyond the present.

Zoe Branigan-Pipe recently took some time to share her thoughts about the conflict between the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario and the Ontario Ministry of Education.

I think that she speaks nicely the thoughts of many teachers – she loves teaching and all that goes along with the job.  She sums up her post with a reflection about Trust and Regulation.  I would suggest that Goodwill could also be thrown into the mix.  There’s a big difference between an agreement bargained collectively and one that is imposed on one side.


6 Ways for Educators to Promote Digital Citizenship

It’s amazing how there are educational blocks to talking about Digital Citizenship.  It’s seldom that you’ll find a student who isn’t using Social Media outside the school hours.  Think about what this really means.  It means that they’re taking their attitudes and values and applying them as they see fit.  While we’d like to think that the kid are alright (I guess), you can’t help but shudder when you think of how we struggle with issues and they are left fending for themselves?

We don’t use the tools to their advantage; we block them so that they become an item of curiosity; we make stupid comments like “Twitter is where you tell everyone what you had for breakfast”.

Wouldn’t it be better if students were set up to succeed?

Where do you start?  Deborah McCallum from Big Ideas in Education provides a list of six ways that educators can promote digital citizenship in a positive way.  It’s a good list – I really like how she ties it to Character Education.

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Hello #etMOOCers!

So, Donna Fry is taking the leap into the world of MOOCs.

And there’s nothing like making your learning visible – and why not record it on video and post about it while you’re at it!

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She’s open and sharing and this should be a good source of reading as she learns as part of #etMOOC!


It is all about the “@” too.

Somehow, I overlooked this article last week and so am including it here.  Sheila Stewart and I had a bit of a back and forth about the @ symbol in Twitter messages.

Back a bit when Twitter decided to make this a huge change in the way that people communicated, it wasn’t uncommon to see messages in your stream starting with a period.  This was to get around the new rules that a message that starts with an @ is a reply and not necessarily for the masses.  Of course, there are ways to get around it but …

Anyway, Sheila took some time to do some investigating and wrote a post to explain all about this.  It’s a good instructional bit and if you have friends who just don’t quite get it, send them over to this post for a little lesson.

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Please take the time to read the complete postings from these great Ontario Bloggers at the links above.  The complete list of Ontario Edubloggers is available here.  What?  You’re a blogger and not on the list?  Go to the link and complete the form and you will be!

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