Summer holidays have officially begun, thank goodness and I’m spending some time figuring out what exactly I might do this summer and what I would like to accomplish in the realm of my own development. My last week of school was less than inspiring with a number of things happening that reaffirmed my thoughts about…
My current reading selection is Transforming Schools by Allison Zmuda, Robert Kuklis, Everett Kline. This has been an interesting read and there are many things I’m mulling over. Today, in the mail, I received my monthly copy of Educational Leadership. Guess what the topic is for the month? Giving Students Ownership of their Learning! Well, if that…
It’s the middle of July and this will be my first post for the summer, if I have time to actually finish it. It’s not that I haven’t started a number of posts but none have reached the publish stage. The reason I’ve not finished these is that life outside of the educational world has…
Like many of my twitter friends, I am still in a sort of after-glow from attending the TLt Summit last week in Saskatoon. As I begin to connect some of the things that went on and bring together ideas with conversations, I am slowly getting a better idea of how the conference participants’ and their…
Today was another monumental day at school. For the first time, students were brought together to create the policies and consequences which they will follow in the upcoming year in the areas of attendance, lates, cellphone use and leaving school during the day. Areas, which up until now, had been the sole domain of the…
I’ve been working on trying to figure out what I might want to talk about to administrators during my 45 minutes presentation at the Tlt conference that is coming up in two weeks. My intro to the presentation was using technology to help manage your school. I began writing about that and, low and behold,…
It’s Sunday afternoon and I’ve just finished putting away all the things from our second Ultimate Youth Night. This night is a opening evening for youth in our community to come together in a safe and supervised setting to enjoy movies, games, gaming and music. Our first event had about 50 youth attend from 7:00…
As our students are leaving school and entering a more global society, we have become more interested in how they are doing compared to others around the world. We compare them using various test outcomes, pinpointing where they’re successful and where they need to improve. These results then drive the data driven decisions that districts and…
This week has been busy and it’s only Tuesday. It is the annual music festival in our community and I have 5 children participating in several categories plus my wife is doing a duet with one of the girls. It is also drama festival week which means our highschool drama troupe is hard at work…
We just finished parent/student/teacher conferences and the school is now quiet. Everyone else has gone home to rest and get ready for more conferences tomorrow morning. We then have the afternoon “off” – I’ll be here getting ready for early dismissal on Monday and doing other things while the students are away. In the quiet…