Photo Credit

Before I begin this post I should let you know that earlier this week I had some amazing ideas for a blog post.  Unfortunately, my week became rather busy and um……my car broke down……my dog at my homework……my Internet connection was bad…….sound familiar?  As a result, my incredible ideas for what certainly would have been the best blog post of all time, were unfortunately lost in my tiny brain.  At any rate, sometimes I write best on the fly.  Thus, I bring you what I hope will be a decent post…

I asked the SCH community an important question in my last blog post; how will you change this year?  My intentions were two-fold, first to tell you all that I wouldn’t be changing my blogging style, and second to see how YOU planned on changing this year.  But wouldn’t it be hypocritical of me to ask that question and not relay my own intentions for change?  To that end, one of the major adjustments that I plan to pursue this year will be with the way I approach professional development, personally as well as for SCH.  While we can all certainly benefit from the expertise of outside professionals, we have some amazing talent here at SCH that can be of great benefit to us all.  I want to focus PD around in-house peer mentoring and learning coaches, with a strong focus on those that are most important to SCH, the students…not on us, and not on the technology.  Furthermore, I believe it’s extremely important for all us here at SCH to become connected educators.  What is a “connected educator” you might ask?  Dr. Christine Heine @cheinesch (who is currently modeling a fantastic approach to connecting to the upper school) sent the following link to the US Faculty in August, providing an in-depth primer on what exactly a connected educator is, and how you can become one – The Connected Educator Starter Kit.  We has a number of such educators here at SCH that I plan to lean on in the upcoming year to ensure that we all begin to connect with one another, fellow educators, esteemed colleagues, and leaders in the the various disciplines of education and technology to help each of us improve in our practice.  One step that I’ve taken towards initiating an internal SCH Academy Personal Learning Network (PLN) is adding the hashtag #schchat to all of my tweets related to school activities to start the internal conversations.  If you’re a “Tweeter” please do the same and we will certainly continue the conversations related to PLNs, social media, professional development, and so much more.  We have big plans folks!  By the way, not sure what any of these terms even mean?  Please reach out and we will setup time to go over all of this in-depth while the tech team continues to work on our new innovative approach to professional development.

An example of an outstanding virtual conversation that I had last week with a member of my internal SCH PLN was with Dr. David Salmanson @DavidSalmanson.  After reading two interesting articles last week, the first discussing collaborative possibilities with the flipped classroom, and the other related to Smart Boards and pedagogy, I sent the following two tweets out that ignited the conversation:

“Does the word “lecture” make anybody else cringe?”

“Do Smart Boards facilitate student centered learning? What’s your strategy for de-centered pedagogy?”

Upon receiving notification of a response to each of these Tweets (while I was eating dinner), David and I were engaged in a thoughtful conversation that most likely would have never taken place if not for Twitter.  Feel free to take a peek at the conversation by glancing at either of our Twitter pages between 9/12 – 9/13.  This interaction illustrates the dynamics of a conversation that can occur between colleagues interested in a particular topic, at any given time.  For example…during dinner, ha!

Now you know that I can’t end a blog post without at least one video!  Given today’s release of the iPhone 5 and the end of a long week,  it’s only fitting that I leave you with some iPhone humor.  Check out this video from the Jimmy Kimmel show where iPhone lovers (which I most certainly am) are duped!

(JimmyKimmelLive, 2012)