Republishing from Aalto university blog. The course mentioned can be found here, sorry at this time is only in Finnish. If you wish to translate the course in your language please contact Tarmo Toikkanen (tarmo.toikkanen@aalto.fi) . The course material are published … Continue reading →

We are happy to announce that 3 community members will present Eliademy to the Georgian Educational Technology Conference. Giorgi Araviashvili, Markozashvili and Marekhi Jeladze decided to spread the message of Eliademy to the teachers and school administration professionals of the … Continue reading →

  Frozen Characters do the Thriller Dance:  http://youtu.be/G3bns2s342s   Tagged: creation, frozen, Just for Fun, Thriller dance, YouTube

Standardized tests play a very big role in how our educational system, curriculum and teaching practices are organized. Educational change may very well hinge on whether these tests will change over the years. I was recently watching videos from curriculum.org that showcased Alan Luke discussing issues of standardized testing: http://www.curriculum.org/k-12/en/projects/allan-luke-continuing-the-conversation. The videos were an excellent complement to […]

Originally posted on Sharing Simcoe:The Simcoe County District School Board (SCDSB) hosted an informative professional development session about social media with an amazing lawyer, Nadya Tymochenko, and Superintendent Chris Samis. We learned about some of the legal issues regarding how schools and school boards use social media. As educators, we need to consider some…

I was recently made aware of a comment that a teacher made about the removal of standardized tests this year. It was something to the effect of: ‘I have no idea what or how to teach now that the tests aren’t going to happen‘. This was a real ‘lightbulb’ moment for me. I thought, what […]

Curation and Information Literacy.

  I have been thinking a great deal about what it means to teach in ways that allow for student agency to be actualized. We need to be experts with technology and curriculum, and more. However, we also need to move far beyond the technology tools and the curriculum expectations with our teaching, to ‘meet’ […]

I have been reading Stuart Shankers amazing book entitled Calm, Alert, and Learning: Classroom Strategies for Self-Regulation. As I am reading Stuart Shankers amazing book, I am starting to think of the Learning Commons with an added lens of how to help students also self-regulate. As I integrate my new learning, I cannot help but consider how […]

I really wanted to let you all know about a workshop I’m participating in on Tuesday, November 3. This is a Free workshop introduces books that deal with managing classrooms, engaging students, and promoting literacy. You’ll have an opportunity to hear some new and favourite Pembroke authors as well as 3 children’s authors whose books your students love. […]

Collaboration unfolds differently in different situations, yet more often than not, we make assumptions about the effects of collaboration in all settings and for all purposes. I recently read the following document entitled: Collaborative Overreach: Why collaboration probably isn’t key to the next phase of school reform by James Croft: http://www.cmre.org.uk/sites/default/files/Collaborative%20overreach.pdf According to this article, […]

I think it behooves us to ask ourselves whether collaborative assessment practices including moderation, is different now that we are headed into 2016 - versus what it looked like in 2006? The process of grading and assessing students is very subjective, and it always has been - but with so much information, technology, globalization, opportunities […]

Why do we assess our students literacy skills? There are several key reasons that we need to be involved with formally assessing our student’s literacy: First, we can gain key diagnostic information about the current skills that our students have. We also can glean key information about the previous knowledge and experiences of our students […]

Planning time is important for teachers. Teachers require time each day where they can have some personal autonomy to grade, organize, plan, build, create, and meet with others. Teacher-Librarians, as leaders in the school, who have a pulse on everything that is going on within a school, and a plethora of resources, can give very […]

Research on multicultural groups including Black, Hispanic, First Nation, and ESL suggests that standards based reforms, large scale assessments, implementation of standards based reforms are unfair (Volante, 2008). We run into problems when the big data is always used to prove what works in education, for instance, why we need Librarians, more standardized texts for […]

I find that supporting struggling readers in Intermediate is very difficult. It is difficult to support with a classroom library or school library collection, difficult to run guided reading, and difficult to preserve self-esteem because using websites and books that may be at appropriate reading levels are also often for ‘little kids’. It is important to […]

  We spend so much time talking about the technology, and all of the great new apps, programs, tips and tricks. Undoubtedly it is a literacy unto itself. But do we really teach our kids how to ‘read’ the internet? How do we harness literacy skills as they specifically relate to the technologies available to […]

When working with our young readers, the way we design our instruction and assessment has a significant impact on the development of proficiency.

  I have the opportunity to be part of an amazing inquiry in SCDSB that is looking at the learning environment as the ‘Third Teacher’.  We are looking at how well-designed innovative spaces can be harnessed to help students optimize their learning potential. I am particularly interested in how library and classroom design enhances literacy […]

  The following checklist is based on the new Ministry of Education Monograph: The Third Teacher Please feel free to print and use for your own reference. Created by Deborah McCallum Deborah McCallum http://twitter.com/bigideasinedu

A revision slide presentation I made for Unit B181 - Understanding the Leisure and Tourism Industries:

A series of revision films I made for GCSE Leisure and Tourism (OCR) - Unit B181 - Understanding the Leisure and Tourism Industries:          

We use ClickView across the school to stream videos from our online library - for those who have not seen it ClickView is an online video platform, in our case containing our 1,600+ videos, plus access to another 11,000+ in the ClickView Exchange. With our staff moving over to Chromebooks it gets us over the lack of a DVD drive and also moves much of the content watching out of lesson time.     ClickView have now added direct sharing to Google Classroom, using the recently released API’s - allowing staff to directly share a video into Google Classroom without the need to leave ClickView. (Seemed appropriate to pop the video in ClickView)

I made this document for a staff training session on Google Classroom - feel free to copy and use if you want to.. Getting Started with Google Classroom For more detail the Google Classroom Help Centre is also quite useful.