Thursday, May 24, 2007

Not Many More Sleeps...

This is proving to be one of the most difficult times of my career. I am taking over the role of Principal , which of course has not officially started, and I am trying to finish my last University class. I feel anxious, excited, nervous, overworked and definetly underpaid. I think I should start up a business; I think I should take a couple of courses in computer science and learn more about languages and software development. One of my brother works as a Computer System Analyst for SED systems in Saskatoon, and he is an amazing guy. He and I could work on a few projects together. I think that what we need is more CAI which delineates best pratices and which aligns with the curriculum. After teaching for nineteen years in so many different subject areas, I think it would be a fantastic challenge. I'm going to do some collaborating with a few people over the summer...

Professional Development and IT

Does Technology Really Change Education?

I believe it can, but professional development is necessary. Teachers, must understand constructivist pedagogy, and how it applies to education. They need to understand that IT can be a powerful tool to support this paradigm shift in education. Karen Henderson's Beyond the Mouse and Modem 2006 results show that only 13% of all educators completed the survey. I was disappointed with this turn-out. How many of the 87% of teachers who did not complete the survey are IT illiterate? How many educators chose not to complete the survey? How many may have started the survey and quit? Were there some who did not know about the survey? I encouraged my staff to complete the survey, but I'm not sure if they all did.

I have been thinking about embedding curriculum consulting. Would the best consulting practice be half time teaching and half time consulting? If I taught ELA and SS for half of the day and had the other half day for working with teachers on my staff and teachers on a few other staffs. There seems to be evidence to support that peer tutoring/teaching is very effective. I could be sharing my ELA unit activities/lessons/assessments with the teachers as I/we use them.

Cathy