Slowing It Down

I remember when my children were small and life was busy.  They would be fascinated by the smallest things in life from a caterpillar crawling along the sidewalk to a pretty dandelion bobbing around in a sea of green grass.  My usual reaction would be to say, "Oh isn't that cool, but let's go now." …

No More Excuses

  Our school staff has reason to be grateful when it comes to available technology in our school and to our access to bandwidth. Our school division does put both as a priority for student learning. Even though we have many devices and we have the bandwidth to provide us access, a lot of what we…

Meaningful Mindset

Here I am being prompted to write another post because of something I saw on Facebook.  I am not sure if that means I should spend less time on Facebook or not, because it does lead me to think of some important topics.   Growth mindset is a topic that comes up often in educational…

My Son, The Learner

Late last night as I was watching TV my son appeared from outside.  When I questioned him as to where he had been, he replied, "I was building stuff."  He then proceeded to show me an elaborate potato gun he had constructed and explain to me how it would work.  He also made sure I knew…

Having Fun Doing It

I was able to start my week in Saskatoon at the Saskatchewan IT Summit.  Not only that, but I had the opportunity to take two of my teachers with me and totally enjoyed being able to get to know them away from our building.  All in all it was a fantastic way to start my…

Striving to Make Learning Authentic

How many times have we heard the following questions in our classrooms? Why do we have to learn this? When am I ever going to use this in my life? What is the purpose in learning this? These seem like valid questions for us to consider. I am an avid reader and because I am…

Getting Better At What We Do

I spend a lot of time thinking about improvement. Mostly about how I can improve my teaching and leadership and hopefully, in some way, have some influence on improvement in in our school and our system. Right now I am reading "Effective Supervision" by Marzano, Frontier and Livingston. The basis of the book is about…

Creating a Blueprint for Learning

I spent some time yesterday at our school professional development day talking with part of my staff about possible changes we could make to our timetable to accommodate more projects, more cross-curricular connections and more blocks of uninterrupted time with our students. I am very lucky to have an innovative staff that always works hard to do what…

Why I use Twitter…

At some point this year I set the goal of writing on my blog at least once a week.  That is a difficult goal when balancing work and family, but writing is something I enjoy that allows me a creative outlet for my thoughts.  Lately though, I have been to my blog, but feel like I…