2010 was an amazing year for me and I never expected 2011 to continue in the same vein… but, on both a professional and a personal level, the year has been significant and memorable! My good friend @MrMalcontent asked me on Twitter what my highlights were – but there are too many for a 140 character tweet (or even several!)
After a few weeks of sorting out arrangements, it was a real joy to spend time on secondment with Microsoft earlier this year. During my time with the Partners in Learning team, I had the huge privilege of working with some inspirational innovative teachers – and it’s good to see a large company sticking to their principle of supporting, nurturing, encouraging and sharing good practice when it comes to the use of technology to enhance education. Being able to attend the European and US Partners in Learning Forums in Moscow and Seattle respectively was a fantastic opportunity to see how practice is continuing to evolve due to the creative and imaginative uses of technology by teachers from all over the world – definitely a professional highlight! Of course, standing in Red Square and travelling on the Moscow underground were personal highlights – who’d ever have thought that I’d be able to visit that historic place! The Seattle trip had another purpose – another professional highlight – as I had been invited to the first Partners in Learning Institute. It’s hard to describe just how much fun was had with 49 other enthusiastic educators from all over the world! Laughter and learning filled the week in equal measure – the research-based training had depth and substance; the friendships forged are very special and it is wonderful to be able to follow what those friends are doing all over the world through the power of social media!
And as the secondment came to an end and I was preparing to return to the classroom full time, a change in direction led to my joining TES as the IC T subject lead …. You can find out more about what I am doing there; I particularly love my trim waist on my avatar! Again, the principle of supporting and encouraging professional generosity – which we know drives standards up across education as a whole – is at the forefront and I’m enjoying working with other teachers as they continue to share a fuller range of quality resources – with so much sharing I guess you could say my role is as curator-cum-cheerleader-in-chief for those teachers! And it’s always a huge privilege to be able to go and work with other people’s classes – thanks to all those who let me come and continue being a practising teacher! After all, the children are the reason for sharing resources – so we share good practice, so we don’t have burnt out teachers who are all re-inventing wheels, so we support each other… Working with my lovely new colleagues and the great team that is being established is a huge privilege. The new role has led to this blog being quieter of late and the comments I have about the use of ICT in schools now tends to be via TES and @TESict.
Personal highlights include seeing Les Miserables and Wicked, visiting the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, getting a Kindle, moving house (twice!)… Buying my own house was remarkably stress free and there were just a couple of hours of nail-biting in the two months of paperwork, so I was extremely fortunate. The research into Digital Learning Dialogue continues and I hope to be completing that (or should I say the first part of that) and sharing it more widely during 2012 – I’m afraid I’m on my third tutor in a year but that’s due to personnel changes at the university, not because I have scared them off!
Two years ago at the Microsoft UK Innovative Education Forum, Stuart Ball from the Partners in Learning team said that life would potentially change for those who were going onto the European Forum….. life has changed beyond all recognition in the last two years since I was given that amazing opportunity – I remember each step of the journey with fondness and gratitude – and I’m looking forward with optimism to all the new adventures that 2012 will bring! Who knows what there will be to reflect on next New Year’s Day….
