The Ontario Educational blogging community is amazing and continues to grow and inspire. As always, I encourage you to take a look at the great things being mused, shared, or thought about by these great digital leaders. There’s just so much to learn.
Here’s some of the inspirational things I happened upon this week.
After a couple of sad posts (I empathize and send positive thoughts, Aviva…), she’s got her blogging mojo back.
She describes a class situation that I think we’ve all been in. What do you do when a student gets bored or uninspired about the tasks at hand? There are lots of analogies to use here – I think I’ll use this one – drop back and reload.
Read her post and see how she handled it.
Response to @dougpete and using Social Media with students
Brandon Grasley had written a post sharing his experiences about using social media with students and shared some of the concerns that the teachers in his session had about its use. I’ll bet that you could come up with the list without reading his post but do it anyway.
tMI – Students’ Personal Lives and Twitter in the Classroom. I may have missed the original post but decided to jump in with a reply anyway and that inspired a followup post from him. I really like this advice that he’s included. Isn’t this the message that we should be sharing everywhere? It’s a good reminder as folks jump in and a reminder if you’re already in the deep end.
We are developing online presence all the time, and remembering that online presence is a real-life presence should go a long way towards ensuring we make good choices in our interactions with students.
One benefit of the OSSEMOOC project is new bloggers. Welcome Denise Buttenaar to our exclusive group! Her first post talks about taking chances and she considers putting her thoughts online in her blog one of her chances. I hope that it’s the beginning of a long list of inspirational posts.
Her post had to make me smile. I have fond memories, as a district computer consultant, of going from a secondary school to an elementary school and having to shift gears based on the student clients.
It’s so much fun once you get the hang of it. Talk about your differentiated instruction!
This is a student blog that I follow because it’s just so inspirational at times.
In this post, the bookybunhead crafts an absolutely beautiful poem. I’m in awe – I could never write poetry and am so impressed with those who can. She paints a picture with a real surprise ending. Thankfully, she does go into a description of what inspires the poem. That make me like it even more.
Surefire Ways To Improve Your School’s EQAO Scores
So, putting your nose to the grindstone and other traditional ways that we’ve always tried to improve by working harder don’t work.
According to this post by Andrew Campbell, we could have saved millions in testing by following his advice gleaned from the top 15 EQAO scoring schools.
Of course, improving the scores isn’t what makes the newspapers. It’s the fact that they are ranked so the cycle wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem.
If we followed his advice, perhaps PD Days could be reclaimed to doing other things?
Tweets of the Week – April 27, 2014
David Fife is keeping track of Twitter messages that inspire. He’s got a nice collection this week, including the one below that I actually had caught in my own message stream. It sure rings true…
Brought forward here to share and make sure that I don’t lose it!
As always, thanks to these folks for their thoughtful efforts. Please visit their blogs so that they know they’re not blogging in a vacuum!
These blogs and the rest of the Ontario Edublog collection is located here.
When you land on that page, there’s a form there to enter your own coordinates and I’ll be happy to add them to the collection.
doug -- off the record 
Please share your thoughts here. I’d enjoy reading them.