This conference for me has been an intentional immersion in the hopeful ideas of school and learning. I’m avoiding big talk about products and tools, instead seeking out positive pathfinders - the people and ideas and documents that, to me, are pointing learning where it needs to go - into rich and deep discussions of how and why we learn and what’s worth bothering to “cover” versus what’s worth doing.
As it’s the start of a new school year, I’ve been asked to set some goals for myself for the year. There are many, many projects that require my attention, as well as the daily work and questions that keep me busy, but I do want to declare some goals that I hope to return to throughout the year and think about more. I’ll be posting them as independent posts here over the next little while - and I reserve the right to develop the final list later - but these are things that I think are worth doing right now.
2 responses so far ↓
lhuff // Jul 1st 2008 at 6:18 pm
I was thrilled to get to meet you face-to-face today at the blogger’s cafe. I think you’re on the right track: we all need to step back, take time to reflect and identify target areas and set actionable goals–steps we as individuals can take to put into ACTION what we know is good pedagogy.
lhuffs last blog post..Lehmann’s Progressive Pedagogy Dead-On
Janice Friesen // Jul 3rd 2008 at 11:42 am
Bud (the teacher),
I was hoping to meet you at NECC this year. Your name came up in several conversations I was in and I am guessing that I saw you many times, but did not know I was seeing someone I wanted to meet!
Anyway, in reaction to what you are saying here one thing occurred to me at the conference. There is just TOO much to keep up with and to think about. Life is just too short to do it all. I think what is important is FOCUS. What are you focussing on? My concern is the way teachers are adopting technology in schools is the way that it has been for the last 20 years. I keep hearing “I am the only teacher in my school who ________ (fill the blank with blogs, wikis, podcasts, uses technology, has a webpage, does webquests, etc…) Shouldn’t the situation be more like “I am the only teacher in my school who does NOT use __________.” ? Or is that an impossible goal? There are so many options for improving teaching and learning with technology now it seems like we should be able to find something that matches everyone… So, you would not have ONE teacher who uses all technology, but ALL teachers using some technology when it makes the most sense…
Just my current thought,
Janice
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