November+2013

November...went by in about four minutes flat.
Truth be told, I am writing this entry on Christmas Day, so clearly I am a bit behind on my monthly updates. Looking back through these posts it seems like I write about 1000 words a month related to ed-tech, Dakota Collegiate, teacher Professional Development and whatever else strikes my fancy. This November was a busy one which meant that writing here was supplanted by writing elsewhere, namely for University course work. Even so, it was a busy month at work/school with two PD Days that we orchestrated as a team at Dakota.

So, one paragraph at a time. In November I had the (repeated) privilege of working with a student teacher from the University of Winnipeg. The first thing that I asked her to do was to set up a Weebly page about the novel unit that she intended to teach. Fortunately this request was met with no concern whatsoever, and she had a decent web page all about H.G. Wells and "The Invisible Man" set up in about a day and a half. This made me wonder about the acceptance and uptake of ed-tech by pre-service teachers. More than ever the idea of setting up an online portfolio, a web page, or some sort of contact system like remind 101 is completely normal for student teachers but seems confounding and an unnecessary imposition for those who are already established in the teaching profession. I also asked the student teacher (to be clear, the proper term here is "teacher-candidate", but my own inner-curmudgeon reverts to "student teacher" as I think it is a more apt phrase for pre-service teachers) to use a simple Excel spreadsheet to keep track of assessment data, and this too was no problem. In fairness, not all student teachers are equally tech-literate, but woe to those who can't figure out a system like MapleWood, StudentsAchieve, or Tyler interfaces for student management. Tech //within// education changes over time. I remember using a #2 pencil to bubble student grades on to tractor-feed paper to be run through a giant scantron machine. Report writing has a tech angle. Instruction has a tech angle. Ed-tech is a much bigger game than the part that I usually like to write about, which is how teachers and schools can leverage tech to enhance learning. Tech is enhancing all sorts of things related to schools, and hopefully learning does not get lost in the clatter.

The two November PD days at Dakota provided opportunities for the crew that went to ISTE 2013 to re-cap and report about what they'd learned, to look again at our school vision and mission statements, and to re-visit the Digital Fluencies based on the work of Ian Jukes and company. We used the newspaper tower building exercise to look at solutions fluency, and it all worked out. We also had some time to re-visit the LMS that we are using. I find that right now some of our PD is a look back to consolidate what we have done, and some of it is also a look ahead to where we might go next. After all, the day to day at our school seems just so normal for us that I can forget about how odd, how curious, how exciting and how innovative the 1 to 1 Bring Your Own Device nature of our school really is. When we look for others doing what we are doing, we find very few who are doing a mandatory 1 to 1 AND BYOD together. Some places are BYOD, in a limited or voluntary way, others are 1 to 1 with computers supplied by the school. Our model blends the best of both, but it can be lonely not having many other schools with whom we share an implementation model.

November also saw my Brother move to Winnipeg, my Mother visit from Vancouver for two weeks, and my volunteer coaching duties for curling AND for indoor track and field got going. Plus I teach every day. No wonder I didn't find time to squeeze in this post earlier. Life crowds in. Hopefully we can each find some time to pause and to reflect upon all of the things that fill our days, and try to record a bit of it along the way for those who might want to look in. I guess Christmas Day is just such a time.