Principal Connections

Since I arrived at my school, I have overseen Special Education. It is my favourite portfolio, albeit the most time-consuming and challenging. It is one of the few aspects of my new role that allows me to reconcile no longer being in a classroom on a regular basis. Plainly put, in this capacity I can help kids who need it the most without anyone running interference. One of the new protocols that I implemented from day one is that I attend all of the transition meetings with the Department Head of Special Education of the grade 8 students with exceptionalities planning to attend my school in grade 9. I developed a checklist for our feeder schools of the information we would be seeking so that the elementary teams would be prepared with the requisite information. When you look at the list, it is somewhat long - ish. We don't even get OSRs in a decent amount of time and when it comes to these students, we need as much information about them as early on as possible so that we are re...

I love memes and would be elated at the day when I see an exercise that involves re-purposing images like these in classrooms. Here are some I thought I'd share:

Recently I hosted a day-long drop in session for teachers called " Leveraging Social Media ". In June of the last school year, I made a year-long commitment to the teachers on my staff who indicated in great numbers, that they wanted more in-house PD to support the various technology needs on staff. I decided that the last Tuesday of each month would be dedicated to Tech Tuesday. I don't allow for field trips to be booked on this day to eliminate the need for on-calls, which frees up all teachers to come to the conference room on their prep (yup, you read right... they agreed to it...) and receive bite-size PD that they would find practical, yet manageable. I don't determine the focus of these sessions. I use Google forms to generate ideas and the last round indicate a huge number of staff expressing interest in social media and how it could be integrated into the classroom. Staff expressed specific interest in Twitter and blogging and I added in Pinterest and Insta...