Launching my goals and aspirations for 2013 out to the world

Two years ago I discovered the power of Edmodo and Twitter. I found other people’s blogs were invaluable to see what they were doing in their classrooms and love the ideas and different perspectives they disseminated.

I am eight months into my blogging journey and loving it. One of the big reasons I started blogging was to share my own perspectives on education and to reflect and set goals. As the title suggests I am launching my own goals and aspirations for this year.

Thank you for reading on. In many ways this is more for me to actually clarify my own ideas and I would love for you to comment and add any other goals that you think I should be aiming at. I already know that many of these goals will morph into something different and this is due to having such an amazing PLN ( you know who you are).

Here is my list:
1. Reboot, improve and gamify my Food Product Development project with World Food Quest 2022. I spent a lot of time last year developing the structure for gamifying this unit of work. It was not universally successful and I am very keen to make it work this year with many tweaks and improvements. Watch this blog as I will be talking about this soon and here is a previous post on the my attempts at gamification.

2. I am in the fifth year of teaching and I am always looking for ways to teach the art of cooking. I have restructured our Food Technology program’s for the new semester courses in stage 5. The main goal is to make the teaching and learning more student centred.

3. I am involved in a GAT extension and enrichment project for our top year 7 classes, cross faculty. This is a very exciting as we will also be involved in creating a new learning space in our library which will be gutted and re imagined as a flexible learning space. I have a semester based Food Miles project based learning project. The team encompasses teachers from every faculty in the school and we will create cross faculty projects in the second semester.

4. When I found Edmodo in 2010 I fell in love. I saw the potential across the school and established the school sub domain in 2011. This is my big whole school project. I am joined by a very passionate team of teachers from most faculties and we have worked with teachers and students across the whole school. This year we will bringing parents in to the Edmodo sub domain, migrate the school student folders over, establish links with our feeder primary schools, establish Edmodo mentors across the school, promote whole school projects through Edmodo, complete setting up the district sub domain for our college structure and continue to develop the Cromer Campus Edmodo training website. if you want to have a look at the teacher section contact me and I will send the password.

5. Discovering Teach Meets last year was such a revelation and I attended 4 excellent events. I love the concept of the ” unconference” with motivated teachers from all systems sharing what works in their classrooms with 2 and 7 minute slots. I will organise with a close friend a Teach meet through our college at our Freshwater Campus in term 2.

6. I am very passionate about professional development for other staff and have introduced the concept of having 2 teach meet style presentations each staff meeting. Our first staff meeting did not go well as we ran out of time. I am adamant that this will work with different timing within the staff meeting.
I believe in sustainable PD utilising the talents of our own staff and people in our region and moving towards E learning for some PD to allow access to training anytime any where on any device.

7. The laptop program for the DEC finishes this year and I have been dabbling with mobile learning using QR codes, web 2.0 tools and apps like socrative to make my classes more student centred. I
I am interested in building a program for BYO devices in the next couple of years to ensure the continuation of the cool ICT that is happening in our school.

8. I have used my I phone to take food photos in my classes last year and using Animoto to create engaging presentations that have been shared via Edmodo. Jeanette James setup an innovative idea using Instagram. to read more click here.
This year I will establish the food@Cromer Campus through Instagram to promote student achievement to the world.

9. Twitter has become my social media tool of choice for building a cohesive PLN and I will increase my PLN by 20% this year. If you have not setup your Professional Learning Network then I would highly recommend you do.

10. Something I have not spoken about on this blog is my desire to become a Head Teacher of TAS. I have worked in Hospitality for 20 years and run 5 restaurants as head chef. I have spent last year participating in whole school projects to get more understanding of how the whole school operates and i am ready to lead my own team.
A big focus for me this year is to write an education resume (this is a very different résumé to anything I have done in the past). I would like to start applying for a Head Teacher positions by the end of the year.

12. In the Christmas holidays I setup a scoop it account to dabble with digital curation. I find digital curation intriguing and need to tweak the search functions to find quality blogs to post about technology in the classroom. I really want to contribute more to my PLN across Edmodo and Twitter

13. I really enjoy blogging and will develop my blog by posting at least once a month and adding my digital curation to a page on my blog.

14. Finding the work/ home balance is always a challenge. I have a gorgeous 2 year old, 5 month year old and a loving wife. I am enjoying the advantages of been a teacher and will get home at a reasonable hour each night to spend time with my family.

15. I am in my third year of Peer Coaching and I am excited that both my learning partners agreed they would like to continue this year. There is an opportunity this year to upgrade my qualification to facilitator which will allow me to train Peer Coaches across our whole college. . For more on Peer Coaching type peer coaching into the search box of this blog.

16. Like every other year many new opportunities come along and I will embrace them as they come along.

Wow life as a teacher is never boring and it feels good to have put all of these goals down on my blog. Thank you for sharing my goals and aspirations. If you liked this post please follow me on Twitter. Feel free to comment on this post if you think I should add something or any ideas you have.

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