Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Now What?

I'm not waiting any more.

We did not get enough participants in our online program to run it for a second year, despite how successful it was in the first year. There are plenty of reasons for that, which I might go into in later blog posts.

What's next?

I'll be heading back into a more traditional classroom after spending a year teaching online. In may ways it's like a sabbatical. I've been invigorated and refreshed by many new ideas that I want to bring to my classroom.

One particularly exciting part is that I had to pack up all my old stuff a year ago and clear out my room. Now I'm moving into a new room for the first time in 10 years. With my experiences of the last year I will walk into my room and re-think all the things that I did for so many years.

For example:

  1. Why do I need a teacher desk? 
  2. Why do I need a filing cabinet?
  3. Why do I always have the students facing the same way, every day, all year?
  4. Why put the homework on the board when I can put it in a shared calendar online? (Shared with parents too!)
  5. Why do anything on paper? (Actually there are good reasons to do things on paper at certain times, but it is important to ask if it's the appropriate medium.)
  6. Why am I the one deciding what all the projects and assignments should be? How much can the students do?
  7. And so many more.....
But I'm afraid.............

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