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What an awesome year this has been! So busy that blogging was out of the question!learnt so many new things and experienced some of them the hard way! But all in all, an exceptional year of my teaching experience. Google Sites has worked partly for student records and moving to Google classroom will be an interesting development too. Working on a new website for myself which will host the blog (yes, will move out of wordpress but might embed a plugin on my website for easy blogging). Signed up for a Emerging E-leaders online course on Core Education for next year, which is an 18 week approx. course starting term 2. One of the biggest things I am looking forward to is a seminar that i will present to a Teachers college in Mumbai in December this year. I also hope to give a Games in Education seminar at another high school but still working on the arrangements.

Twitter has been a new change in the way I read new research. There has been some fantastic discussions held on twitter and its all about networking these days. So twitter works as a better platform than most other social networking sites.  Pond, the New Zealand portal for teachers providing ultra fast fibre to school and a gateway for teachers to access resources was also launched this year. I believe it will go a long way in assisting teachers to manage their resources. However, work needs to be done in order to convince teachers (most of them ) that its not too difficult to migrate to.

A fire at a local school here in Wellington highlighted the need to saving work digitally. All teacher resources (some of them 20 year plus) were apparently burned down. I can imagine beautiful hard bound books and encyclopaedias turning into ash, but if the content was Over Head Projection sheets, I might be a bit concerned about where we stand in our delivery methods. Accessibility to devices sounds reasonable and achievable and could replace these older systems easily (but carefully). Its a concern that students are having an increased spelling error and crap handwriting because of increased used of devices ( not proven yet though but clearly apparent ).

So the topic of connected learning is making waves and embraced well in most schools. Students are learning on the go and flipped classrooms is a common technique in most learning places. One of my focuses for next year will be my feedback procedures. Its really hard to provide constant feedback to students in Technology class because of the lack of time (fixing problems takes the most, then helping most students learn the techniques on a one-on-one basis). The next couple of years will be awesome to develop and understand these practises and make sure effective learning takes place with an instant feedback process. Next blog entry should be within the month as I tidy up resources and plans for next year.