Scaling EDU Change

Last fall the Waterloo Region District School Board held their third Digital Learning Symposium.  Each symposium has focused on sharing effective classroom practice,  changing practice and promoting innovative practices.

The series of events has provided an opportunity for educators to come together, share, network and talk about next steps to pushing the envelope, building synergy and scaling change at the system level.

One of the strategies used at this recent symposium was to capture the best practices shared through video recording and create a WRDSB system blog to share the learnings and innovative approaches through other initiatives such as meetings of system leaders, school staff meetings and subject association sessions.  It is important to keep the momentum of the change conversation going.  This public blog also supports open learning for all educators.
innovative-change

  1. Student Produced Learning Objects
  2. Project Greenlight 
  3. Leveraging Technology for Inquiry Based Learning
  4. Deepening Mathematics Understanding with Coding
  5. STEM in a Globally Connected Classroom 
  6. Digital Work Flow  
  7. Student Writing With Storybird 
  8. Helping Little Brown Bats 
  9. Tangling With Triangulation 

I have enjoyed being involved in this project and look forward to working on the next phase.

Tacheles stairs, Berlin

Join in!!!.   How will you participate in open learning by scaling up?

~Mark
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Note 1:  The blogging project calls for a post week through until May, so the sharing will continue through to May. 

Note 2: Creative Commons image by Flickr user Paolo Margari

Libraries in Times of Change

This week I had an opportunity to catch up with Huron Heights SS librarian Lauraleen Reoch for a conversation about leveraging libraries in a 1 to 1 environment.

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Lauraleen shares her observations in this audio interview.

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Resources:

The Huron Heights  library web site 

Follow  HHSS Library on  Twitter

Related Posts:

Learning spaces
Planning for  change
Future Orienting Libraries

~Mark
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Revisiting Participatory Culture

One of the best elements of the web is the ongoing learning and sharing that takes place.  While in many ways, you never really know what impact you will have with a tweet, retweet, participation in a chat, a blog post,  commenting , creating a podcast, video etc.   I like the notion of the ripple effect.

ripple effect

More and more though, I am thinking about levels of learning.  Even though all of the examples above can be classified as participating, contributing, sharing and learning.  I wonder though,  what is it that  actually triggers one to find the PLN that will help you learn, challenge you, push you, and follow through to grow and change your practice?

I am sure that many web users enjoy the variety of ways to participate.  I do too, but I find both the enjoyment and learning that comes from reading blogs and the related comments to be a great experience.

Here are a few highlights from my web travels this week:

Comments on a  CBC podcast 

Do you live in a bubble? by  Donna Fry (@fryed) 

The 10 day blogging challenge

The nudge from @tina_zita 

An invitation to participate from Heather (@HTheijsmeijer)

Why not join in?  Are you up for the challenge?  How will you participate this week?

~Mark
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