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.............

So What Are You Going to Do About It? Part III

So I started listening to the  The Christian Educator Podcast.

There I discovered a school that was actively using online tools to teach. It introduced me to so many other resources and ideas that stretched my thinking. (See this blog post for some of them)

After a year and a half of listening, reading, and thinking I started looking for other Christian educators in my neck of the woods (Ontario, Canada) who were doing and thinking the same kinds of things about online tools and their impact on education. I couldn't find anyone.

Finally, late in August of 2010 I read Disrupting Class.

After that I decided that waiting for someone else to act wouldn't do. I decided that I would have to do something. But I didn't know what. What's more, I was just a classroom teacher, how would I get anyone to try anything?

It was in October 2010 that I finally had a brainstorm.


So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part I
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part II
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part III
So What Are You Going to Do About it? Part IV

Celebrating My Students work

One of the great privileges of this past year has been working with some amazing students. They have been able to create some fantastic work.

Too often we don't realize how much our youth are capable of.

Here are a few samples of the work my students have done this past year:

You could also go to iTunes and search in the podcast category for "The Young Prophets", where you can hear episode 26 from one of my students this year. (The other 25 episodes are from previous years.)

I want to see more students creating work like this.