Thoughtful Insight From George Lucas

This blog post from George Lucas on the Edutopia site truly makes one pause to think. I am proud to say that much of what are listed as some of the really good things in education are already happening at Gibsonburg High School. Our teachers are working hard everyday to engage students and make them thoughtful and creative young people. Do we still have a great deal of work to do? Absolutely! But I do believe we are on the right path, with the right people to continue to get better everyday. Our kids are counting on us to do so.

Please see the George Lucas blog at: http://bit.ly/a8HTzf

21st Century Learning Initiatives at Gibsonburg High School

Teachers-
I hope you found our in-service day on Monday to be useful. I know some parts of the day may have been review for some of you and if you were able to pick up a couple of new thoughts/ideas/strategies to implement in your classroom, then it was a beneficial day.

Please feel free to comment on this site with your thoughts or concerns. This is a public forum, so anything you post can be shared with everyone else from our Professional Learning Community.

I appreciate the work that was shared on Monday and look forward to collaborating with you as we continue this journey together over the next several years to improve our instructional practices and benefit our students.

To post a comment you will have to register for an account. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

Thanks!

21st Century Education and the Security Filtering Debate

Tonight I was working at school on a presentation for our faculty that is coming up next month. I have previously used this blog to help some of our teachers learn how blogs, wikis and other tools can help teachers and students, collaborate, think critically and solve problems through information sharing. While I can view this blog (and some others) through our school internet connection, I cannot update the blog or post/comment to any blogs because they are blocked by our IT site's security filtering.

How are we supposed to establish Professional Learning Communities (PLC's) and use these valuable tools to collaborate, network and get important work done when we must be off campus to access the tools?

While some may think I am ahead of my time in thinking that social networking can be a positive learning experience for our students and teachers, the system has determined that we can not do this in our building at the present time.

I intend to continue to press the issue to get sites unblocked to help in our efforts to hep our teachers learn new pedagogy's to enhance their teaching skills and benefit our students!

I welcome thoughts and comments for ideas to help with this issue!