#summerLS

Instead of focusing on how I had such good intentions for my blog and haven't even come close to posting regularly, I'm just going to get started on this post and make a goal to post more often. That shouldn't be hard, as I have written exactly four posts in a year and a half.

This is what relaxation looks like! I rewatched the entire first
season of Orange is the New Black with my mother-in-law.
She loved it.

In the middle of June, Todd Nesloney (@techninjatodd), the principal of Navasota Elementary in Texas, tweeted out an invitation to join his staff in a Summer Learning Series (#summerLS). Although I am totally wiped from a crazily busy year, I thought I should give it a try. As it turns out, I'm really glad I did. It explains my return to this blog!

For those of you who don't know me in person, I am a BLOG LOVER. It started out with a little Will Arnett research project (for those of you who know me, keep the details to yourself!). After several months of blogging on my own, I realized the awesome educational potential of blogging, and blogged with my grade 7/8 classes at Fielding Drive Public in Ottawa. Access to the school's one computer lab was always an issue, but the blog work students did was incredible and in 2009, I moved four History classes totally online. You can check out my History Blog and the amazing student blogs. The year after that, I changed the name of my blog to a Digital Classroom and have integrated a class blog that I host ever since. Despite, or perhaps because of, the success of using a blog to help direct my students and celebrate our learning, I have let a personal/professional blog go by the wayside. However, I get so many wonderful resources, ideas and inspiration from blogs I read, I figure that I really need to commit to writing one.

One of the challenges from Todd was to reflect on our teaching practices. I do this all the time, in Twitter chats, with amazing friends and colleagues and, most importantly, with my students. I have very little record of my reflections and am unable to share them with others except in quick 140 character bursts! Maintaining this blog will let me do that.

I could add some profound idea about how my life is like a puzzle - fitting all the pieces together. But, instead, I'll brag - we completed this puzzle, all 1000 pieces in mostly bad lighting - even the super tricky part that is open and blank in this shot.

The past week, I was at my in-laws' cottage on Lake Champlain in upstate New York. Being in a cabin in the woods gave me a lot of quiet, reflective time. Even though I had my laptop, phone and Kindle with me, they spent a lot of time tucked away, unlike at home, where my devices and I are joined at the hip (or lap). I slept well, swam, boated, read (for fun and PD), watched 4 fireworks shows over the lake (one of which had more than 10 people firing off fireworks at the same time - awesome!), participated in only a few Twitter chats, and, with the help of my husband (Captain Handsome) and mother-in-law, completed a 1000 piece puzzle. Going out on the boat gave me reflective time, as it's too loud to have a chat and difficult to multi-task. Like when I am in the shower or the car, I had time to just think.

Not a bad place for sitting and thinking.

There are a lot of things I am doing in my classroom that I am loving. In fact, there are very few things I don't love. That's the problem I'm having. A huge topic of discussion in my life right now is Work-Life Balance and because I am passionate about my work, it's often hard to do anything else. Almost everything I see, read, do or hear gives me an idea for the classroom. A goal for next year, which is reflected in my family and friends' feedback, as well as the feedback I received from my students and their parents, is to scale back. Pick a few things and really focus on those. That will be really hard for me, especially when I hear about the incredible things that are going on in classrooms around the world. I hope that regularly reflecting here will help me. By sharing more of what I'm doing and really taking the time to explain the reasons I'm doing it, I hope that I'll slow down my thinking a little bit.

This has very little to do with this post. It's
just my favourite pic from the week at the cottage.

I am very grateful to Todd for his innovative and inclusive #summerLS and look forward to sharing more about what I learn while completing them.