A Terrific Opportunity!

I remember Doug telling me that one should praise locally and complain globally as a professional who blogs.  So welcome to a praise page!
If good PD looks like this.  Then…
My school division has embarked on a good path.  Today we got the first of 2.5 days of professional development which we will be receiving before [...]

New Starts

We’re back at school and it has been quite the ride.  It is something else to come off of leave into the ‘real world’.  I have a marvelous staff and I’m not saying that simply because this is public.  My principal is dealing with an unfinished renovation which shut down the main office, her office [...]

Children’s literature as a genre

What’s a genre?  A category of literature distinct from other types by its distinctive characteristics.   Is children’s literature a genre?  Nodelman and Reimer look for the characteristics that might be considered common to most children’s literature to answer this question.  They find the following traits:
1)    a basic pattern – home/away/home  A character is unhappy with [...]

A colonial brain trying to be post-colonial

I have been attending Congress 2007 and am trying to process some of what I have taken in there. I have attended quite a number of workshops but most of them have carried a similar thread about the importance of telling stories, hearing stories, writing stories and talking about stories, particularly our own stories [...]

Making connections

I have had a terrific time talking with teacher librarians and teacher librarian wannabes in my courses through the University of Alberta. It is a dynamic and excited bunch of people. I think they are typical of the people that I have seen in the teacher librarian community overall. Passionate about literacy [...]

Over-Underwhelmed – TLit – 2007

I have received some offline comments about this post and I’m stewing about them. I have thought about whether I should pull it but I’m going to try and make some adjustments to make myself more clearly understood. The adjustments will be in italics.
I had three days of conferencing this week. I [...]

Prisoners of Time

Time is a scarce commodity.  No one has enough.  We talk about how busy we are and how much there is to do.  How do we fit it all in?
In “Prisoners of Time“, A U. S. National Education Commision identified time as the missing component in the education system in the U.S. Lack of time [...]

The unending Web.20

Within my course on information technologies for learning, we have been looking at the different possbilities for integrating technology into the curriculum.  The possibilities are endless and as a friend put it just today – “Sometimes it feels as if we are chasing smoke.”  It is hard not to feel overwhelmed by the options.  Do [...]

21st Century Skills

Janice Friesen’s article, Giving Students 21st Century Skills in Multimedia Schools (2003) gives a quick a dirty look at the need for a new kind of assignment in school.  She highlights some of the advantages of the Big Six research method and mentions a few starting resources, including James Mackenzie’s FNO. This article is a [...]

Copyright, plagiarism and school

It is interesting how copyright, free speech and plagiarism are connected. I don’t think I had thought about them as being in a package before. I am trying to make a diagram of it in my mind. I keep thinking back to Lawrence Lessig’s presentation that I’ve mentioned before. How do [...]