gdp's Comments

The Principal of Change : Is our vision too generic?

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:41:26 +0000

Interestingly enough, here in BC, we are grappling with the same issue. Our technology standards are from 1999, and while many of the standards are still current, some of them are hopelessly out date. Maybe we should all collaborate? What would a national set of standards look like? Would that be so incredibly ambiguous so as to be useless?

shannoninottawa : Leader as Host

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:10:09 +0000

One of the primary advantages of "leader as host" is that when it is time (for whatever reason) for the leader to move on, the chances of the changes they've made continuing to be implemented are greater. Too often someone innovative comes into an organization, makes some changes, and then when they leave, most of those changes end up being dropped.

shannoninottawa : What is trending locally and what are we doing about it?

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 04:27:49 +0000

I'd like to see more people in our society stand up against bullying as well. We will never end bullying in our schools, while we continue to accept it in our society outside of school.

Spark | CBC Radio : Tech Gadgets + Kids = Loss of Creativity

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:56:27 +0000

I think that it depends on what applications you put on the devices. If you give your kids an iPad, and all they can do is watch movies, then it is no better than a television (actually, it's worse, because it's highly portable). If you give your students applications with which they can create things, then they have the opportunity to be creative. In this case, it's not the device that is the issue, it is the use of the device. We are trying a balanced approach with our five year old son. He has blocks, Legos, train tracks, an arts centre, and all of the physical tools with which he can be creative. He performs impromptu puppet shows for us, has created "masterpieces" (which he intends to sell for $5.55 each), and has demonstrated repeatedly that he has a creative mind. He also gets to play Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies once in a while, and watch 20 - 30 minutes of entertainment on most days. We try hard to balance his need to get exercise, with his need to relax. We've also installed many applications which are puzzles on the iPhone which he occasionally gets to use and we often find him playing checkers or Unblock-me instead of using Netflix to watch movies. One observation: Our son will often take an idea that he has seen in one of his shows, and expand upon it, and incorporate it into his play. I'm not convinced the technology is the problem, but we definitely need to be, as parents, careful on how our children use it. If they are using it to consume someone else's thoughts, rather than coming up with their own, that can be extremely problematic.

shannoninottawa : Teach them to fish

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:10:26 +0000

I'm sharing your post in some new teacher training sessions Shannon. Hope they feel comfortable enough to comment on it!

The Principal of Change : Why Social Media Can and Is Changing Education

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 01:55:52 +0000

George, I'm going to retweet this for the #ISTE11 crowd. I stumbled across it while searching for your post on the Canadian Unconference planned for next year at the Calgary science school (http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/1821 for your readers).

Philly Teacher : Should We Still Be Teaching Keyboarding Skills?

Thu, 19 May 2011 13:02:12 +0000

Great questions Tony. Some of those converting programs are free, but none of them yet has the accuracy to be faster than touch typing. I've played around with a few options, and all of them require significant editing of the work. Maybe in 4 or 5 years, someone will have that figured out better, I know it is a major computing problem that Google is trying to solve. Your point about the device is so true. Who knows what a keyboard will look like in 5 years? We are definitely starting a period of transition as to what a personal computing device will look like, and as Mary-Beth has pointed out, her ability to type on a keyboard does not translate smoothly into her ability to type on an iPad.

Philly Teacher : Should We Still Be Teaching Keyboarding Skills?

Thu, 19 May 2011 00:11:14 +0000

I learned how to type using a game, an actual interesting challenging game, not one of those boring "educational" typing games. It's called a Multi-User Dungeon or MUD for short. It's kind of like playing Dungeons and Dragons online in a massive multiplayer environment. Sometimes we'd have 400 people online, all playing at the same time, although the game has died down a lot in the past 17 years. The idea is that I had to run around the game, explore puzzles, and solve them, collaborate to kill virtual monsters, and watch my character get stronger. If something goes bad, I have to type quickly to get out of the situation, or my character dies. It helped improve my reading speed, my typing speed, and it was a lot of fun (actually I still play once in a while). Also, many of these MUDs are open source, so that students could be involved in the creation of the zones, as you could install them on your school's server. Imagine a place where kids could practice typing skills, while really enjoying themselves. I don't type with the home row, but as anyone knows me on Twitter, this is hardly a disadvantage...

shannoninottawa : Start Anywhere

Tue, 17 May 2011 00:40:18 +0000

"Start anywhere" that is good advice. It's like when you are cleaning up a room. You don't spend ages trying to decide on where to start cleaning the room, you just start digging into the room literally anywhere.

Edudemic : Private Schools: The Truth About Teacher Salaries

Mon, 16 May 2011 21:21:42 +0000

My private school, by contrast, is very transparent, and our salaries are very competitive with the local public schools. We make just slightly more than they do, using the same salary scale. So not all private schools are bad, but I did work at one in London (cough, cough Southbank) which paid teachers practically nothing and expected them to work like crazy. It was a nice place to work otherwise though, I just couldn't live in London with a family on what they were paying.

The Principal of Change : Video That Should Be Viral

Fri, 6 May 2011 06:17:28 +0000

I agree George. I thought about just sharing Karl's blog post, but decided that the video would get seen more often if I published it on my blog. Hopefully lots of people see it, because the idea is important.

The Principal of Change : Where were you when...?

Mon, 2 May 2011 19:26:52 +0000

What I also thought was interesting was that when people tweeted out cheers for the death of Osama Bin Laden, there were immediately other people responding with criticisms of that cheering. So instead of people spending days before they encountered someone with a divergent perspective on the morality of cheering for the death of someone, they got near immediate feedback. One wonders what implications this has on the development and evolution of morality in our society as a whole.

http://www.themarknews.com/ : No Quick Fixes for Cyberbullying | The Mark

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 01:17:11 +0000

I think that schools need to be more proactive in their teachings around social media. Students live outside of school in an unfiltered world, but inside are generally subject to sophisticated filters (which by the way, are largely ineffective) meant to block social media from entering the schools. Well it's in the schools as soon as the kids come in, you can't pretend it isn't an issue. Instead of banning social media, maybe schools should look at using it as a tool, modelling appropriate use, and gradually moving students from having no access, to situations where by the end of their 12th grade of school, they have full access, but have (hopefully) developed internal filters.

Philly Teacher : Why We Should Be Teaching Social Media

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 21:43:23 +0000

I agree with you Mary Beth. The endless trolls and hateful comments you find on any large website are a consequence of a generation of people who legitimately think it is okay to be nasty when you don't know someone and that somehow think that it doesn't hurt as much because it's online. We need to teach kids (and adults) that these are real people that they are commenting on, and that one should always be respectful, even if you strongly disagree with someone's position.

The Principal of Change : Canadian Educator Conference (May 2012)

Sat, 5 Mar 2011 22:55:53 +0000

I think the name should be simple, clear, and to the point, so your suggestion of the Canadian Education Conference is good. Maybe we can call it the Canadian Education Summit so that it is distinguished somehow from a traditional conference. Canadian Summit on Education? Too fancy, probably. Turns people off, and we all think about all those failed summits our politicians set up. Canadian Education Unconference? Too many people going to wonder what the point of that U and N are in front of the word conference. However, it does certainly give lots of opportunities for discussion. We could also include the actual group of people invited in the conference title, so that it is more obvious to parents and students that they are welcome to come. However this could result in some ridiculously long names, like "The Canadian National Conference for Parents, Students, and Educators interested in Education, and it's also an unconference so bring your thinking caps."

Quisitivity : How to Tame an Administrator

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:46:18 +0000

You made me laugh out loud with the last sentence. Very nice post about some observations of what the role of administrators is. It seems that I've read a lot of posts about people defining roles and I am wondering, do we feel the need to define our roles because they are changing?

Philly Teacher : The Homework Conundrum

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 18:51:14 +0000

While I agree that the feedback kids get from their peers is valuable, what I've read of the research on learning is that the timeliness of the feedback impacts what students remember later, either the mistake or the correction. The closer to a mistake you receive the feedback, the more likely it is you will remember the feedback rather than the mistake. Have you noticed that the child who gets their homework wrong, and then receives feedback the next day, often makes the same mistakes on the end of unit test? I'm fine with practice, we agree on that, I just think there are more productive types of homework students can do, if we assign homework at all.

Philly Teacher : The Homework Conundrum

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 15:56:52 +0000

I'm really not convinced by the argument that homework teaches kids to be "responsible" for managing their time or for their own learning. 1. Who helps the kid make sure they get their homework done? They get all of these various people in their lives who "make sure" that it gets done. How many parent-teacher conferences have you had where a student isn't doing well, they aren't doing their homework, and the parent says "okay, well I'll make SURE they get their homework done." 2. If you've taught 12th grade students before, you'll know that the students who struggled to complete homework in 8th grade still struggle to complete it in 12th grade. They are going to struggle. Completing someone else's work (ie the homework assigned by teachers) doesn't teach responsibility, doing your OWN work teaches responsibility. Do you feel like you've become a more responsible and conscientious adult because you finally finished that stupid report your administrator gave you (which they were required by some bureaucrat to force you to do)? Or do you just resent them the whole time and wish it was over? 3. Time management is learned by having a task you want to complete, one that takes many sessions to finish, and finding ways to complete the task before whatever deadline the task is due. Individual homework assignments each night are like serial sitcoms, they build no sustainable practice, and do not require partitioning the task into chunks. If your task cannot be "chunked", it is not going to help students learn the valuable skill of breaking a task into smaller pieces. 4. What feedback do students get about not doing their homework? Is it mostly useful "oh you should do this, or this would help you get it done" or is it mostly negative feedback to reinforce the idea that the students are "bad people" for not completing that assignment they were given. Surely we recognize that negative feedback is not a terribly good way to motivate people to succeed?

Philly Teacher : The Homework Conundrum

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 15:47:58 +0000

I'm going to argue that your "practice" questions are a waste of time. If the kid got the lesson during class and did practice during class, doing more practice at home isn't going to do much for their understanding. They are better off revisiting the lesson in video form, applying the ideas to a bigger problem, creating their own ideas from the math you've taught, but repetitive practice is a waste for them. For the students who did not get the lesson, they desperately need feedback, nearly immediate feedback, on the work they do at home. You can't provide that feedback until at least the next day, and at best you can do it with the whole class. Many of your students will struggle with their practice, feel horrible that they can't do it, and get turned off of math. If you want to keep them "in the game", you need to find ways to excite them about what they are doing. Stop the repetitive homework practice. Find something more productive for your students to do at home if you must, but you are causing harm to your weakest students.

SmartBlog On Social Media : How Twitter can help teachers connect with students -- and each other

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 19:28:55 +0000

I'd also recommend talking about how teachers are connected via Twitter and using various hashtags to connect the conversations. #edchat is the most popular of these hashtags (common search terms), but there is also #sschat #engchat #musedchat #artsed #mathchat #scichat and many, many more.