Sharing Our Learning

I would like to welcome everybody from Parkland School Division back to the 2011-2012 school year!  It is always nice to come back to school and connect with colleagues for the first couple of days when we are all well rested, and then see the return of our students.  I hope that all of you had a restful summer and are excited for another great school year with Parkland School Division!

Just to introduce myself, I am George Couros, and I am currently in the position of Division Principal of Innovative Teaching and Learning for PSD70.  I am looking forward to not only connecting and sharing learning with all of the schools in our division this year, but more importantly, I am hoping that I can help connect some of the great teaching and learning practices that are happening in our schools through my position.  Being able to be a part of different schools within the division, I have seen so many amazing things that are being done by our teachers and my hope is that we can help to facilitate different ways we can share these best practices with each other, and with the entire world!  There are some amazing things that are happening in Parkland and we need to share this with the rest of the world to improve learning for all students, while also learning from those same people.

If I am successful in my position, I will have helped build leadership within our division at all levels, while also helping to connect best practices throughout the world and implementing them within our division.

As the year progresses, I will be sharing projects and initiatives that we are co-creating within the division.  I will also try to share some of the best links that I see through my participation in my own Personal Learning Network (PLN) and archive them here throughout the year.  I would love to not only share these with you, but it would be great if you were willing to comment and share your thoughts.  This idea came from a colleague of mine, Jill Gough, from Atlanta, Georgia. Through these conversations is when we truly get better.

Here are some of the great links that I have began to cumulate for this school year that may help you in your practice or at least start some conversations:

1. Chris Kennedy, a superintendent in British Columbia just wrote a post regarding commenting on blogs that may be helpful to share as I take on this new endeavour.  Chris states, “In the education world,  we need to model how we expect students to behave and engage”, which I believe is so important.  This is a great way to model our learning by being open with our own practice while being able to have some respectful conversations with each other as a school community.
2. As many schools are interested in looking how to create digital portfolios for our students, and we are currently looking at how to successfully implement this across Parkland, this post regarding digital portfolios is fantastic to share some of the benefits of this learning.  Check out “5 Reasons why Our Students are Writing Blogs and Creating Eportfolios“.

Just as a footnote, I would love to leave you each week with a Creative Commons licensed picture on this blog that shares a quote or something to think about.  To find your own pictures, please use this search engine: Search Creative Commons

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by jenn.davis