Good morning! Looking for some good reading? Go no further that these great blog posts from Ontario Edubloggers.
In Search of The Thing
- SHARON ETHIER
- https://heartandart.ca/in-search-of-the-thing/
As a teacher, how many times did you say to yourself…
“If I could just …”
With the result being great learning and involvement by students.
That’s the topic of Sharon’s post as she takes us to all of the learning that she had done as a professional as she looked for “The Thing”. I smiled at the list of things that she provides – been there, done that.
She concludes that these are tools, good tools, but not “The Thing” that she was looking for. Just tools.
She digs a little deeper and comes to the conclusion as to what she feels that the “The Thing” actually is.
AI is NOT the Enemy
- Lynn Thomas – @THOMLYNN101
- https://wordsgrow.com/2023/11/08/ai-is-not-the-enemy/
I’d been sitting on this blog post for a while. Every time that I re-read it, I found something else.
The post has a great deal of links to external resources; Lynn has really done her work researching this topic and her own thoughts about AI in the classroom. It’s easy to come up with reasons to ban it; it’s more difficult to think of all the ways that it can improve things and that should be your big takeaway from this post.
You’ll want to bookmark this.
Lynn is doing a session next week over Zoom that you might want to register for.
OneWordx12 – January 2024
- Elizabeth Lyons – @MrsLyonsLibrary
- https://thelibrariansjourney.blogspot.com/2024/01/onewordx12-january-2024.html
I can remember when “One Word” was a big thing and people were sharing their one word for the upcoming year. In this post, Elizabeth shares her word for January. This promises a year of posts about a word of a month.
Elizabeth has made considerable changes in her professional life – leaving the library to have her own kindergarten classroom, dropping her long standing leadership with the OSLA, and is focusing largely on her teaching. She’s left Twitter and is approaching social media in a different manner.
I think that is sad, but perhaps a sign of the times, when she identifies that the online community that had largely been sharers are now taking more than they’re giving back. I do think that her analysis is dead on.
I wish her nothing but the best and success in January as she “re-start”s.
2023 Review of My Year on Twitter
- Laura Wheeler – @wheeler_laura
- https://mslwheeler.wordpress.com/2024/01/08/2023-review-of-my-year-on-twitter/
You know, you think you know someone or at least the parts that they care to share on social media. In Laura’s case, I’ve been a follower of hers on Twitter for a long time. I love the work that she does with sketchnoting and her Learning in the Loo initiative.
I learned even more with the discussion that I had with her for the “Interview with Laura Wheeler“.
When I saw this post self-reviewing herself on Twitter, I thought it would be a little dry.
It was anything but.
Yes, there were definitely things that I knew but I learned so much more as I worked my way through her collection of embedded Twitter messages.
It was an interesting look back at things she had done and been involved with. If you’re looking for something new, maybe one of her shares will inspire you.
Solving a Climate Puzzle, One Tree Ring at a Time
- Michael Frankfort @mfrank_76
- https://stao.ca/solving-a-climate-puzzle-one-tree-ring-at-a-time/
To the STAO blog, Michael added this post from Patricia Lonergan.
I can remember counting rings on trees as a youth at a Scout camp. It was one of the activities that we did – we found a tree that was dead and we took a look and did our counting. Sadly, that was about it.
I say sadly because Patricia takes us so much deeper.
You can count rings from live trees and leave them standing. There’s far more than just counting rings that can be done. The tree can really tell a story. Put 50 of them them together and it tells a more interesting and comprehensive story.
By the time I go to the bottom of the post, reading the text and looking at the pictures, I got a real apprecitaion that what we had done in Scouts was really cursory.
Please find the time to click through and read all these terrific blog posts.
If you’re an Ontario Edublogger or you know one, I’d appreciate you reaching out and letting me know.
This is a regular Friday morning feature here and has been for a long time. All of the old posts are available here.
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doug -- off the record 
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