Mid-Season Form

The sun has (mostly) returned and the world is once again waking up following another winter, and we're into full swing at Turning Point. Spring is always an exciting time at Turning Point because graduation is getting closer and closer. If a student feels she/he is within striking distance a light may go on inside and push them across a line they never though possible - graduation!

At this point in the year we're also all in a pretty good groove - not a rut, but a confident place where we are comfortable with out systems and students (if we're ever brave enough to feel that - it will likely be now). At this point, lots of our students are using the English BLOG for assignments, and the iPads are being used everyday, by a growing group of students in class.

Currently we are trying to further develop our roster of pad friendly assignments and are planning a teacher training session within a month's time. We've booked a computer lab at our site and have invited a handful of alternative educators from other programs in the HWDSB. The day will hopefully be a building day for BLOGs for these teachers and their sites. We've assigned homework and teachers are now compiling resources they'd like to have on their own BLOGs.

It's been nice to receive some teacher feedback, and we look forward to more. We've also restarted our student surveys in order to get feedback from the students. It's nice to be able to generate assignments based on this feedback, and it's nice to hear "sir, can I do that assignment when I'm done this one?"

We still need to find a way to incorporate the iPads into student creations (word processing, slideshow creation, etc.) - it's new technology for them, and the touch screen may be a limiting factor keeping students from typing up assignments on the pad, but we still have a lot to learn with this.

The next step may be generating a BLOG (or a section in our current BLOGs) that is focused on student collaboration and dialogue. It is difficult to have discussions in a self-paced program - students are rarely in the classroom with a group of students studying the same assignment, so we're experimenting with a 'virtual disussion' concept that will utilize the BLOG platform. We'll let you know how it goes, but has anyone tried something like this?

We're always looking for wisdom from other educators more experienced in these matters - literally, all ears!