Celebrating an Amazing Journey Five years ago, a small group of WRDSB staff (Mary Lou Mackie, Mark Harper, Kim Keena, Jim Woolley and I ) began meeting with local community business leaders who were members of Communitech to discuss the classroom of the future. Although no specific classroom design was agreed upon, general conclusions centred … Continue reading WRDSB Futures Forum Program Wins Award
It is hard to believe that after almost 2 years of planning, the WRDSB Futures Forum Project will go live. This has been a real journey involving: ongoing discussions with the Communitech organization in Waterloo to look at a view of a future classroom PLP experience for a centrally based team (including me) The formulation … Continue reading WRDSB Futures Forum Project Goes Live
The start of this school year has an extra kick of pizzaz for me. WRDSB is launching a 1:1 Chromebook program for all grade 9 students in the system. The intent is for students to keep their chromebook for their 4 years of secondary school. The learning space has changed: access to digital resources for … Continue reading 2016 1:1 Kickoff
I experienced a wonderful virtual learning opportunity this week with some fantastic educators from ADSB. Donna Fry, who was leading the learning sessions on site, invited me to provide a kick off presentation to their day. My task was to ignite some change thinking by linking the areas of technology enabled learning, technology change and … Continue reading Virtual Sharing with ADSB
I have been a longtime believer in a self directed job embedded approach to staff development. For several years I have had the privilege of working with a dedicated team in IT Services at the Waterloo Region District School Board to design and deliver staff development programs fitting this ideal. Last fall I participated in … Continue reading Celebrating Future-Ready at WRDSB
It was a pleasure for me to team up with Jennifer Paziuk to present on Innovative Learning Opportunities. As promised, we are sharing the session resources. Futures Forum Project -June 28, 2013 from WRDSB Learning Services on Vimeo. Additional blog articles about the WRDSB Futures Forum Project. ~Mark & Jennifer
I had the pleasure of attending the WRDSB Digital Learning Carousel event today along with 400 educators and students from our Board. The event provided opportunity to share our collective insights around digital learning, changing practice and planning next steps forward for our organization. The carousel sessions I attended included online novel studies, innovative practices … Continue reading Digital Learning Carousel Reflections
I enjoyed my recent opportunity to present a session on ever changing EdTech world in K12 education at EOIT2014. Three points from the various conversations over the day captured my attention. Limestone DSB, CIO Wayne Toms described how becoming active on Twitter has “changed his approach to PD forever”. He emphasized the importance of having … Continue reading EOIT2014 resources and reflections
“The Ken Spencer Award for Innovation in Teaching and Learning was established with the generous contribution of Dr. Ken Spencer to recognize and publicize innovative work that is sustainable and has the potential of being taken up by others; to encourage a focus on transformative change in schools; and to provide profile for classroom innovation … Continue reading Celebrating Excellence
I happened to come across Aviva’s post yesterday, titled online-offline-where-to-draw-the-line. Aviva makes that point that “students need a safe place to make mistakes, and I don’t know that social media provides this safe place.” Check out the comments from some of the readers [here]. We do live in interesting times for sure. Perhaps this is all a … Continue reading On or Off Line: a Perspective
~ Mark's Musings ~ blog.markwcarbone.ca 