Daily Archives: February 6, 2011

I started a blog post intending to reflect on the first week of the 2011 school year. I scrubbed that draft last night after staring at the first paragraph for about twenty minutes. It was forced reporting and there were no anecdotes that required documentation in digital format. Perhaps it's too early ... or maybe, this blog is more about my own learning and my ephemeral interests rather than my own impact on the students under my charge.

Daily, the blogs I subscribe bring me new avenues to explore and to connect to. I can browse art and design ideas, shake my head at the insanity that is US education reform or think through potential ideas to bring into my own classroom. I'm lucky enough to work at a school where the professional learning is of a high quality and sometimes, it is draining enough to do that justice without trying to pull in all of the exciting leads I get from the network. We've been implementing Assessment for Learning, are about to delve into mathematics curricular renewal using George Booker's Teaching Primary Mathematics, have our department's Teaching for Effective Learning document at the ready and continue to become better at implementing Inquiry Learning in our classrooms.

So when Dan Meyer points to an outstanding Maths resource, I am interested. But I have to weigh up the benefit to my own practice and the time it will take away from me coming to grips with my own school's choice of maths direction which will be tightly aligned to the incoming Australian Curriculum. And I still owe Dina Strasser a properly worded response in the comments section of this blog post, but I need to delve more deeply and know what I'm supposedly using on a daily basis more deeply before trying to describe the contrasts between her own approach and an approach that we are trying to make an embedded part of my school's operation.

So, if I find something interesting in what I have to come to grips with in my own professional existence, I'll try and blog about it. I'd like to make more of an effort to participate in more online events like K12 Online or even ds106 and I need to be OK with the fact that it may be purely self indulgent on my part and that focussing on that is a viable thing to be documenting. The line between narcissism and sharing can be a very thin one.

http://www.savagechickens.com/2009/06/the-narcissist-test.html

http://www.savagechickens.com/2009/06/the-narcissist-test.html