Good question…who am I connecting with. I have just had a light bulb moment in the last twenty four hours. I was having a discussion with someone about my life circumstances and I have realized that I have been spending a huge amount of my time and energy devoted to this diploma program. All the while, trying my hardest not to lose family time. So what have I sacrificed? Time spent planning and creating really innovative things for my teaching. If I am truly self reflective, there have been many lessons and units that have not been as fantastic as they could have been had I had the time and energy to make them better. In reality, I am connecting with others in this program more than I am connecting with the teachers in my own school. Not in the way of social connections, but with intellectual connection and I need to do something about this.
As I consider this project, one of my desires was to host a forum in which I could stay connected with the incredible and innovative people in my classes. However, when I take a step back, I realize that the people I really need to connect with again is my staff. I will always be able to access innovative information about school libraries and teaching so I need to focus on putting all this intellect I have been nurturing in the last two and a half years into practice. I will be adding information about Inquiry Based Learning and teaching onto my library site with the goal of reaching the teachers at my school.
We had a good discussion in class about what draws people into a website or a blog and while I understand the need to have a hook to draw people in, I think that my hook will be to encourage these types of lessons and units as I collaborate with all the teachers in my school this year. As I do this, I will show teachers what I have put on the website and how to use these resources. If we do it together, I am sure they will be more inclined to look at the information. I am fairly confident that if I just put some information out in cyberspace, the only people who would seek it out would be people already interested in this type of learning and then I would really be preaching to the choir. I want to broaden the horizons of the teachers around me to create better practice for the students in my care. Perhaps then, when I feel I have found success in this topic I will be better equipped to broaden my ambition to district, province and world.
After reading some of your blogposts, I can really feel all the time you have thought about your website. Particularly in this blogpost, I connected with how you felt sometimes due to time you were unable to produce the best lessons. In the classroom, it is so easy to visualize all that you want to with your teaching. However, in reality, we get pulled in so many directions in our job, that I always find that I have done very little at the end of the day. It is hard, but it this commitment that will keep us going. It is also important to learn to forgive ourselves when things don’t go completely our way. I also feel that the teachers are not intellectually connected to me as our class. I find that one of the barriers of more intellectual interaction have to do with the fact that many teachers do not have much background with topics, like using ICT and personalized learning. It is difficult to start a discussion when there is not really a foundation with which to even begin with. We really need administrators to step up and provide more professional development for teachers to kickstart those discussions.