My Adventures in Education

Just over a week ago I finally sat down and took my Google Level 2 Certification exam! And I am super excited to announce that I passed! It has been a long few months of training - I would sit down whenever I could find the time, so it was so fulfilling to finally be able to complete it. Truthfully, I was very nervous about this exam. There were a lot of new apps and material in this part of the training, and Sheets seem to be my nemesis. When I am practicing in Sheets, it seems to be okay, and it makes sense, but as soon as I stop practicing with pivot tables, etc. I forget it all! Needless to say, when I finished the exam, I sat there in nervous anticipation, waiting for the results. It was a flood of relief when the results stated that I passed! Now I need to reflect on next steps and how I plan to use my certification and the things I've learned to improve my teaching practice. I'm really excited to sit down and incorporate Google My Maps into my ESL and Spanish c...

Over the past few months I have been slowly chipping away at the Google Educator Level 2 Certification training modules. It has taken a long while to get it all done because, let's be honest, who has time to sit down and dedicate hours to training?! I wish I could, but I still have classes to teach, my kiddos to pick up, dinner to make, etc. - but that isn't the purpose of this post, so I digress . . . As I have been going through the training, I've been blown away by different resources that I just didn't know about! The thing I love most about pushing myself to get certified is that there is so much to learn, and so much I haven't explored. So it made me think: if I find these things useful, why not share them out? Heck, why don't I share out a list of resources that I have discovered along my journey to technology learning, and help out fellow educators who maybe have not yet stumbled upon these gems as well?! And so here they are: 1) Google My Maps - Y...

Every once in a while, we need to come down from our exciting, motivating high and realize that not everyone is ready for change, and that's okay! We all come from different lived experiences, with different motivations, and different goals, and it's impossible to make everyone happy all of the time. This is my latest lesson. I am beginning to realize that my excitement to learn new things and to challenge myself in areas that may not seem to connect traditionally to my particular courses are not always seen as useful or helpful by others. I get it. And while I want to advocate for teachers to have choice and control over their PD, I also need to accept that not everyone sees things in the same way. I always find that I have these conversations, and then I walk away, and five minutes later (or less) I wish  I had said something else! I wish I could be better at explaining things in the moment, so that these conversational regrets or what-ifs wouldn't happen. Life would ...

This past week or so has been crazy! It has been very uncomfortable for me, for all of the reasons that had me doubting this whole blogging journey to begin with - vulnerability and putting myself out there. It started when a fellow Halton colleague tweeted my blog out to the world - this scared me, and to be honest, it still scares me. I had only shared it out selectively to a few colleagues to get their input and to see if I was even any good at this whole blogging thing! I hadn't yet convinced myself that I was brave enough to put it out there for more people to read, especially if they knew me! Well, the cat's out of the bag - and many people have reached out to me about it. It amazes me how afraid I was of people reading these thoughts/reflections about teaching. I always try to do my best, but I also recognize that I am nowhere near perfect, and that I make mistakes just like any other human being. I think I was afraid that people would concentrate on the things tha...