Virtual Travel – with Rick Steves

I’m lucky to have had a big screen added in my kitchen, and while I enjoy my cooking I often travel vicariously along with the experience and antics of Rick Steves on his YouTube channel. Recently, I found out that even before the Covid 19 epidemic, he had edited many of his longer travel documentaries…

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Wide Open School @ Common Sense

Wow! Many of you will already know the amazing work of Common Sense Media in the world of Media Literacy. They’ve put their heads together with 25 other companies to curate some resources for families and educators and are calling it Wide Open School. It’s laid out beautifully, check it out! https://wideopenschool.org/

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Whose Land: Acknowledging Land, Communities and Treaties

Let’s Get Creative! Exploring the Whose Land App from TakingITGlobal  This workshop was originally created for ECOO Camp Peterborough and this is also posted on Teach Ontario. We were ambitious in thinking about what we could accomplish in 50 minutes and ended up with some really valuable discussion about how the interactive map and the…

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Exploring By The Seat of Your Pants

For several years now, I’ve been recommending Exploring By the Seat of Your Pants, and having amazing Ontario educator, Joe Grawbowski (@grawbowskiscuba), at Minds on Media events at the BIT conference and for the Ontario Teachers’ Federation Pedagogy B4 Technology Conference. Like Joe, I’m a big believer that the computer is a portal to the…

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OTF and the Professional Learning Ecosystem

One of my favourite Ontario events is the Teacher Learning and Leadership Program (#TLLP) . This program, supported by a partnership between the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Ontario Teachers’ Federation, has just celebrated its 10th cohort of educators engaged in teacher-driven learning and leadership projects–an option available to every school district in the…

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Coding in 2004 – Looking back to move forward…

Sometimes there are moments that bring you back in time to reflect on your teaching practice, and a visit to YRDSBs Quest Conference this week certainly did that for me.  Brian Aspinall @mraspinall was mentioning his early efforts in coding with kids in a club that he started while he was a University student in…

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Google Forms and Siri Unite For Recording Anecdotals

I’m a big fan of using Siri on my iphone and have been ever since I began using speech to text software with students in about 2006.  Boy, has the technology improved since then!  I now use it to create reminders, schedule calendar events and dictate emails and documents when I have a quiet place…

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#IICTI Learning @MakerEd Toronto

It was great to visit the York School this week to attend #MakerEdTo.  This was a fantastic opportunity to connect the #iicti AQ course members to a network of educators interested in constructivist and constructionist uses of technology.  An added bonus was that they got to hear all about Seymour Papert from the Keynote Speaker…

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YPALS – Youth Helping Youth at the YMCA

Peter Skillen and I had the pleasure of attending a working group session at the YMCA of Greater Toronto led by Candy Chow (YPALS Coordinator – ‎YMCA of Greater Toronto) and Nina Arcon (YPALS Specialist at YMCA of Greater Toronto). This group of about 12 young people are about to launch a blog that will…

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