Now even though I'm officially on holidays and enjoying the time with my wife and kids, I still find a chunk of time in the day to check on the edublogosphere and participate in the conversations. Yesterday, I checked out some parts of the World Bridges New Year's webcast marathon. It was a bit like running into someone you know at the supermarket when Jo McLeay surfaced in the chatroom as we have followed each other's blogs for a while now. Typical Australians - our first greetings involved the weather (scorchers two days leading into New Year) and she asked me if I was doing any IWB training at conferences interstate for 2006. I read this and thought, "Is she serious? I haven't even be out of the state to attend a conference. What would make her think I had any credentials in the IWB field?" Then I thought about all of the posts over the past six months re: our IWB implementation here at my school and maybe the way I've presented things via this blog and the team blog Activboarding makes me sound more expert than what reality says. I can't even recall my typed response to Jo. I don't know, maybe that little voice at the back of my head saying, "You don't know that much. Leave it to people further up the Pyramid Of Influence," that is the problem.

So, it was really interesting to read John Pederson's post today with his newly announced plunge away from conventional educational employment. It's got me thinking about the coming year and where it might be going. And you know what? What I do at my school is pretty good and I shouldn't undersell its importance in the least. I still have heaps to learn and could always improve but who is totally on top of things. I certainly don't want a Seachange in the same vein as John. So with a few weeks of leisure still ahead of me and when I still have time to pontificate, here are a few things I'm looking forward to as part of my job. (Caution: Half baked ideas may look good on the outside but may need to chucked in the bin if they are inedible.)

• Another six or seven ActivBoards going into classrooms and the Resource Centre early in the year.
• Restructure of my role gives me only half time in the class and half time in my coordinator role. This means an overhaul of the Problem Based Learning program, and me working with each class in the school for a 8 week block of 2 hours every week. One of those 2 hours to be spent on a class ICT Project - I'm thinking digital stories, blogs, information literacy skills etc.
• My middle school team has a submission in to present at the 3rd International Middle Years of Schooling Conference. I wrote it and titled it "Engaging The Digital Native – Use Of New Technologies In The Middle School Classroom." (See abstract submission here.) We'll see how it goes.
• A proposal to get more of my staff blogging for professional development. If I can convince my new boss (she's very tech savvy) then my goal would be to give teachers a chance to set up and maintain their own blog (at edublogs, where else) as well as a Bloglines account and give them accredited T&D time to read, comment and post their way to a better understanding of what faces them in the rapidly advancing world of Education 2.0.

Who knows what else will crop up? John knows for sure that in today's world, nothing is certain.