It was a three year gig. That's what John Laverty — the superintendent at the time — told me, in the principal's office at Dundas Central when he offered me the job back in 2010. He said I would need to be thinking about what I wanted to do next, which seemed ludicrous, having just …
Category archives: Pedagogy
Introduce Yourself
We were asked to sort out a means of having members of the Learning Services team introduce themselves to each other in a digital way on the first day back to school. The workflow created may be helpful for those of you looking for a digital way for your students to tell you a bit …
The Student Blog Quandry
When we first set out to build the Commons, it was with the inspiration of other projects like the CUNY Academic Commons, and the Domain of One’s Own project headed up by Jim Groom among others, which at the time was a small project happening at Mary Washington University. The ideals behind that project has …
From the Club to the Classroom
So many of the things we run as clubs make great classroom activities. How do we take the opportunities out of clubs, and find ways to integrate them deeply into classroom practice? Newspapers I was supporting a school recently on launching a school newspaper club. What might that look like as a classroom activity? I’m …
OER Repository on the Commons: A “Brief” History
TLDR; Version: Go visit https://oer.commons.hwdsb.on.ca/ Over the past few weeks, Andrew Kelly and I have been working together on Version 2.0 3.0 of a new Open Educational Resources Repository on the Commons. This continuing work dates back to 2015, when the 21CL team here @HWDSB began planning the Professional Development sessions for a roll-out of …
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Some Thoughts On Professional Development (upon rolling out iPads to Grade 9 students)
“But there is another reason why people abhor the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it. They won’t all learn the same things!” “The people who are horrified by (this idea) have not accepted the very elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age) remember …