Here’s a bit of the best that I read from Ontario Edubloggers this past week.

The Heart of Teaching: What It Means to be a Great Teacher

This is the sort of post that you need to bookmark and, when the going gets tough, you pull it out and read it.  Rusul Alrubail penned this post for Edutopia and I can’t think of a better description for why teachers teach.  Could there be no better reading assignment for a Faculty of Education student?

This is a required share with your staff.

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Contribute to Big Ideas in Education

Calling all authors … Deborah McCallum would like to give you the opportunity to post to her blog, provided you haven’t posted your content elsewhere.

She lists a number of “Hot Topics” that would appeal to her and her readers.  I had to smile that GAFE is on the list but your submission…

Those who know me may know how long I have been mulling over this post.  How long these thoughts have been percolating, simply based on how many times I have brought it up in conversation.  You see, it’s been bugging me for a while, yet I know so many amazing principals that call themselves “Lead learner” that I have been afraid to say anything because I am not here to hurt, nor here to make others feel bad.  But the whole lead learner title, can we discuss it for a moment?  And perhaps rethink the use of it?

Before people get upset or chalk it up to me not understanding, hear me out.  I know what the title “lead learner” is supposed to signify, I have had many conversations with people who have explained their intent, and for that I am grateful, because those conversations have helped me understand the title…

You’re passionate about writing.

You wanted to create an article that will loved by readers. It is hard to please them all but at least you will get a percentage of them, liking your work.

But it seems so hard that your mind almost blown away of pushing yourself to the limit of your so called “creative imagination”. But still it suck!

Every writer has to be creative and effective in all their writings and projects. There is no other goal for them than to be more effective.

But how to write effectively? What were their secrets?

Actually there are no secrets in writing effectively. You often oversee it, it is actually in front of you. You did not notice it because you are so busy doing other thing. But still you wanted to be an effective writer.

Now here are the “Secrets” in writing effectively, but not actually a…

We know people learn through different means…visual, auditory, kinesthetic, aural, logical, social and solitary…and one size doesn’t fit all, so why do we teach like it does?

Judie Haynes has spent much of her life teaching ELL students and has immense knowledge on the best ways to help and teach them in your classroom. On her website, www.everythingesl.net, she has an article titled, Seven Teaching Strategies for Classroom Teachers of ELLs which gives a brief overview of seven great strategies all classroom teachers could use in their classroom in order assist ELLs.

Using visuals in your classroom helps all students. They are able to connect your spoken words with the visual words or picture. Through seeing the picture or graphic representation they are able to connect the unknown English word to a word they know in their first language (L1). Using visuals will allow the student to learn English…

I began a blog post this morning about Ferguson:

The grand jury reached a decision in the Michael Brown case. The police officer who killed him gets to walk free.

I had to pry myself off the Ferguson hashtag a few minutes ago because I was feeling sick. Not only did this injustice occur (again), someone got off scott-free (again).

Frustrated, I stopped my writing there.  I have blogged about this topic before, and felt like it was pointless to do so again.  There was nothing new that I could say that would fix anything.  It was an exercise in futility.  Dejected, I prepared for work.

On the daily commute, I vented a bit to one of my Voxer groups.  In talking to members of my PLN, the idea struck me to have my eighth-grade students blog about their thoughts collectively, for multiple reasons:

• To allow my students space to process and…