As mentioned in my previous post, I was lucky to be in a meeting facilitated by Rick Schwier today. This wasn’t just because Rick, being one of the most positive people I know, is always a great person to be around. The meeting involved educators of all levels within my school division (well – not mine personally, but it is the one that I teach in). From my perspective as a classroom teacher, it’s often easy for me to think of classroom teachers as being the only educators in a school system. But I need to expand my personal concept of educator beyond just classroom teachers to include everyone who works to facilitate and improve the learning of students. As the meeting ensued, I became more and more impressed that everyone had the same primary focus for the discussion – … Continue reading »

This third twitterless day was tough, I’ll have to admit. I was lucky enough to be in a policy development meeting facilitated by Rick Schwier. It seemed very strange to me that I didn’t have any outlet for expressing my ideas/reactions/stupid jokes during the meeting. I actually had to (gasp) pay attention to the meeting. This turned out to be an asset since I’m having a sleep deprived week (but not because I’ve been up late getting my Twitter fix) and unnecessary distraction would have severely impaired my ability to stay on topic during the meeting. And with Rick facilitating the meeting, it was worth giving my full attention (and for other reasons as well, but that’s for another post). I noticed that I’ve been feeling a kind of social isolation as this week goes on, and I think that … Continue reading »

Lessons learned thus far: I miss letting a large number of mostly anonymous people situated around the globe what I’m having for supper, or what my children just did or a link to something cool I just found out on the internet. (If you are interested in links to cool things I’ve found, you can always check out my links on del.icio.us or subscribe to the feed.) At least 2 people read the RSS feed from my blog (Thanks Heather and Donna). I miss knowing that Dean is having a nap. I am less distracted from my work. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. Spending time playing with my children is fun. If this was the only lesson I learned (reminded of, actually) out of this, it is invaluable. I think that part of the … Continue reading »

For no particular reason, I’ve decided to go twitterless this week. Cold turkey. No twitter – reading, checking, searching, tweeting – between this morning and Friday afternoon. I’ve been thinking about how much of my time is spent with twitter, either actively or in the background, during a day so part of this experiment will be to see how much extra time I find I have during my day. I’ve used Slife (now a paid web app, but the desktop client has gone open source and is available from Slife’s Google Code repository) once to monitor my twitter time and the results were not exactly shocking, but the trend was not good. So – a week without twitter. I’m wondering how similar this will be to quitting smoking. Hopefully the headaches and insomnia will not be part of the experience. … Continue reading »

I’ve made it 2 for 2 with podcast production with another episode of the Open Monologue podcast. I did refer to it as the NEW podcast last week, but when I loaded it in iTunes the title for the podcast was the same as this blog. Who am I to argue with iTunes. This time I elaborate on a tweet I made earlier today – “Anyone who works with technology and still trusts it is a fool”. This was an observation made to me by Dr. Barry Brown of the University of Saskatchewan after I told him that the hard drive that contained my M.Ed. project had failed in a grandiose and horrible way. In the podcast, I elaborate on the story. I also play some great music by Mykleanthony. Music links: Morning Coffee (theme music) by ManaloCamp Walk on … Continue reading »

Having failed miserably at the photo a day 365/2009 project, I have embarked on a more manageable project – one podcast every week until the end of June. I’ll still be doing the EdTech Posse podcast – wouldn’t dream of giving those up – but that’s only one of the podcasts every month. The rest – well, you’ll just have to stay subscribed to find out what’s going to happen. I don’t even know yet! The working title is the NEW podcast, standing for the Not Every Week podcast. This time around I rambled on about my fear of water and ukulele lessons (I talked about ukulele lessons – I’m not afraid of them). I also threw in some grooving Creative Commons licensed music, specifically: Morning Coffee by ManoloCamp; released under CC Attribution, Share Alike license My Fair Lady by … Continue reading »

I found out about this video on twitter from Alec Couros who heard about it from Dean Shareski. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7y7NafWXeM] It’s interesting to think that no matter what the medium is, our uses of communication stay the same.