The SHIFT Blog

Did you know that this Saturday is World Creativity and Innovation Day? Halton wants to celebrate this day on Friday, April 20th.   Look around your building for examples of innovative teaching practices, students showing off their own creativity, or just something interesting that resonates with you.   Tweet out your observations and pictures using the hashtag #HDSBInnovates. We want to know what is happening in your building!

We started this year with a Community Building Call to Action.  We can sum up the work that many educators have done over the past month.  However, we’d rather present to you the experiences of one Halton Teacher. Nancy Zigrovic is an French teacher at Iroquois Ridge High School.  She took up our Community Building Call to Action and ran with it! I have often heard it said that with so much content to cover, how does anyone have time for community-building?  Team-building activities such as classmate bingo and “two truths and a lie” seem to happen in the first week of school and never again.  I have often found myself caught in this same dilemma - is it community or curriculum?  I am here to argue that in a 21st Century learning environment, one cannot happen without the other. I am currently teaching Grade 9 Applied Core French with a lovely bunch of students who have made it very clear to me that this will be the last time they ever take Fr...

So we’ve all survived our first week back!  Hopefully you’ve settled into some sort of routine with your classes.  We are hoping that you’ll make daily community building a part of that routine.  We all want our students to be risk takers and feel safe in our classrooms. By building a positive community daily your students will be more engaged and will be willing to meet challenges together. So our challenge to you is to take breaks daily to build community with your students.   Need some help getting started?  No problem!   Here are a few activities that you can try tomorrow!  Feel free to let us know how it goes in the comments or add some links to your own favourite activity. Why not tweet about your experiences using #HDSBInnovates. Here are some activities from Second City that we used at the Shift Summer Symposium . Here are the books we pulling from, check them out, ask your administrator to stock these at school. ...

On June 1st, the Halton District School Board wants to celebrate some of the great things that happen in our schools and community.  The medium for this celebration?  Twitter and the hashtag #LoveMyHaltonSchool.  If you are reading this and are already using twitter, we think that is great!  If you haven’t had a chance to try out twitter yet, or are reluctant to jump into the world of social media, allow us a moment to try to convince you to join the conversation. We want you to create your own professional twitter account.  We also want you to know that it is ok to sign up for twitter and never tweet a thing.  Being passive in an online community is a great way to be introduced to the ins and outs of the community…and what a community it is!  There are so many educators using twitter, and their practice is enhanced by the sharing that goes on in this space. So here is our next Call to Action If you use twitter, send out a tweet on June...

Today, the Shift launches the first in a series of videos that we are calling “Call to Action”!  Here is how we picture it working: with each “Call to Action”, we are asking you to take on a small challenge, reflect on how it’s goes and share your reflections, either here in the comments, or on Twitter using #HDSBInnovates. We are hoping to spark some thinking and sharing on specific topics as we delve deeper into how to innovate and improve our practice as educators here at Halton. So, without further ado, here is this week’s Call to Action.  Have a watch, we’ll be here for you when you get back: So?  What do you think?  What would you like to improve? This isn’t about change for change sake.  If innovation is about "creating new and better things", within education, we have to assess if what we have done is truly better.  If you simply do different things that are not better, this is change for the sake of change. This is why asking WHY is impo...