Day at the bay

Spent Thursday 29th mostly at Bayside Secondary School. Gayle drove me over there and they were really welcoming and made me feel at home. They clearly are on the cutting edge of technology and have invested huge amounts of resources into making sure that education is technologically relevant to students to make sure they can connect to them in a contemporary world.

Saw a lesson where a lower ability class was editing/making videos on bullying. Very impressive to see how they were engaged and self directed.

Another teacher was teaching King Lear. He had originally thought I was coming into an earlier lesson but not-with-standing he had the kids eating out of his hands. This was a college level class and the kinds of questions they were asking and the observations they were making in regard to Lear and any "parallels" it may have to their own lives was astounding.

Grant Montgomery, the principal, was one of those people you can be nothing but inspired by. Clearly a strong vision and purpose who brings people with him on the journey. I think he has even convinced me to broaden my networking to twitter to engage with an international educational community and the thoughts he has on student LEARNING networks are brilliant, will have to think carefully about how to pull that one off wihout opening up more opportunities for students to harass each other.

Some interesting webtools: Todays meet; socrative Diigo, Zite (I think he was trying to sell me an Ipad! [joking]), Poll everywhere, Mahara (looks like Live Binder).

Gayle picked me up from Belleville and we stopped of to watch Abigail's Rugby game (they didn't win!) then all returned for dinner.

Went to watch Paul's Hockey game in the night over at Belleville. No win but good to watch.