At the risk of starting a bit like A Tale of Two Cities: It’s been a long year and yet it’s passed very quickly.
Just as a reminder I have very diverse roles in life (it keeps me young thinking, I hope): I am a Deputy Head Teacher in a comprehensive school in an outer London borough (this includes a role as Professional Development manager), I teach on the Masters and EdD programme for the Open University, I study with the Open University for my second MA, I have a family to look after and some writing/research to do.
In January 2009, I was looking forward to enhancing my knowledge of e-Learning with an Open University course H809. Little did I realise that this would lead to blogging and Twittering like – especially as I had only an inkling of what these even were! I had been dabbling with wikis for High School students and teachers for some time but these took off in a big way and I even ended up having a short article published in Education Today about using wiki technology to assist reflective practice for school teachers. I ran a workshop about this at the EdD residential weekend in July and have just been asked to run a workshop on the same topic at a conference at the Institute of Education next February.
I have gone on to study another Open University course which looks predominantly at the use of ePortfolios for teachers at all levels. This has been a challenging course, not least because of the online collaboration we were asked to so. It has helped me to restructure my own Masters level online forum and has led to greater participation levels on that.
That’s mainly about my study opportunities.
I have learned some other truths this year. I’ll call them truths although we all know that truth is elusive and possibly a personal perspective on reality. I have struggled with why some people feel they have little left to learn and with my role in that. On the positive side, I have been thrilled with the people (aged between 11 and 80 approximately) who have taken on new ideas and even run with sharing these with others – especially some of my younger colleagues at school.
I have learned the joy of achievement – even at my age.
At home, I have learned that one’s family do best when not nagged or goaded – actually I’ve learned that before and will probably learn it again.
It’s been a good year.
What have you learned?
Posts
I learnt a fair bit in 2009, I posted about it too: http://skorlaki1983.edublogs.org/2009/12/24/what-i-learnt-in-2009/
ReplyDeleteI've learned that I spend more time following ideas and less time actually putting those ideas into practice which always makes me frustrated and often times no better than I was before those new ideas.
ReplyDeletegood point - perhaps the trick is to be selective - if so, it's a trick I haven't mastered yet :)
ReplyDelete