Reading Writing Responding

Lego poetry at DLTV2014 As I sat through one of the most horrendous presentations on Office 365, it got me wondering about the question, what makes a good presentation? I sat there thinking what would make this better? What was missing?   At first I thought that it was the absence of any conversation about pedagogy. A point that +Edna Sackson made about last years GAFE Summit in her post, ' 'I Want to Talk About Learning…' There was reference to pricing schemes and packages, what this includes and what that does. However, I had signed up with the hope that I could take back to school a few more tips relating to how to get the most out of Windows 8 - whether it be new applications or different functionalities - I was wrong.   The one thing that held me together throughout was the conversations I was having on Twitter with +Rich Lambert . He too was lost in the presentation. Although our banter was critical of Microsoft and their lack of innovation, much of it...

In a recent  post  responding to the act of giving so prevalent in this festive season, +Aubrey Daniels International  suggested that maybe it is not such a good idea to buy the boss a holiday gift. In the same vein as David Letterman, Daniels provides ten reasons to support his argument: 10. If you do it because others do it, you are doing it for the wrong reason and you will probably resent it 9. If the boss expects it, s/he is a bad boss to begin with and a gift may act as a positive reinforcer for bad boss behavior 8. If a gift affects the boss’ behaviour toward you, it is not a healthy work situation for you or the boss 7. It puts pressure on the boss to reciprocate and it is not a good idea to put pressure on the boss 6. It gets expensive for the boss if there are a number of direct or indirect reports who need reciprocating 5. It is the economy, stupid 4. It may cause the boss to question your motive 3. It is a good time to break this...

There has been a lot shared lately as a part of Connected Educator Month about the benefits of connecting online. In many respects, I agree with +George Couros  that ' isolation is now a choice educators make '. However, something overlooked in many of the discussions and debates are some of the taboos associated with being a connected educator. Some of the reasons why teachers do make the choice to stay isolated. Teacher-Student-Friend? In a recent post , Peter Dewitt spoke about how he saw a photo come up in his feeds from an ex-student, whom he had taught in Year 1. She was photographed finishing her last teaching round. It got me thinking, when is it ok to connect with students (and ex-students) online? Another similar example that comes to mind is from +Adam Bellow 's inspiring keynote from ISTE2013 where he invited people to 'change the world'. A part of this is utilising the power of social media to connect with students through such mediums as ...

It's interesting, when you let go of the usual teacher/student hierarchy, as +Joe Mazza  has with the idea of the ' lead learner ', all else seems to slowly crumble around it. Take for example the notion of 'professional relationships'. I am not so sure which of the two words has had the biggest change. The profession to which everything has become seemingly so serious and accountable or the concept of relationships, which in the past were always so haphazard. Let me firstly look at the profession. What's in the Name? Often people say that you don't always choose your family, I think that the same thing can also be said about colleagues and clients (that is what students are, right?) This may have been different in the past where a student could have been 'expelled', where they would be shunted off to the next school and then the next school until they eventually flunked out of school. The profession of teaching has changed, subsequently h...