My Adventures in Education

So, I found this post, unpublished and forgotten, and felt it was worth posting, even though it has been a long while since I first wrote it. It has been a tough year for me - this is the first year where I have really felt that I've hit a wall, and that I need the summer to help recover.  This post was from November - I was taking two courses at the time (yes, I know that's crazy), and this one was referring to the online course I was taking about Indigenous history in Canada, called Stolen Lives. Certainly an important lesson, though difficult, and I believe it's worth the share. Here it is: The past week or so have felt so long and arduous. There has been so much to do, but it has felt like there aren't enough hours to complete it all. In the Stolen Lives course I am taking, we have been learning more about the Residential School system, and hearing and/or reading first hand accounts. It has been a very heavy week, as this material is difficult and carr...

It has been a while since I last posted. Things have been very busy as the school year wraps up. For some reason June always seems to come out of nowhere, and things feel rushed and chaotic. It didn't help that my family and I chose to buy a house and have a closing date in the final month of school, but alas, life happens.  I always seem to find June a difficult month. I'm always questioning how I taught certain units, or whether or not the expectations that I had for a particular evaluation were fair. It's tough to see your students struggling without wondering if you could have done something differently. They aren't all struggling, or else it would be really clear, but I often think that if I could design the course in such a way that everyone could learn more easily, perhaps I could help the weaker ones, which still supports the strong students as well. The question always comes down to 'how.' The 'how' seems impossible. Every year, my student...

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...

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...