Wow an Edublog Finalist

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I am pleased to announce that my friend Darren is a finalist in the Edublog Awards for 2006. He is up for Best Teacher Blog. I feel his influence every time I read his Blog A Difference.

Darren was the first person to get me hooked on blogging and the power of 2.0. I will be forever indebted to him for this. He was giving his OLE Tango Workshop to teachers at his school and invited some teachers from my school to attend. After a morning in his Mac Lab I was hooked and along with a Grade 7 teacher created two Sargent Park Blog Sites.

There are so many must reads on Darren's blog. I would like to point out a few of the recent posts he has created.

He recently did an in service about Numeracy across the Curriculum. It is an AWESOME attempt to get teachers from all parts of a school to focus on the importance of numeracy. Here is an excerpt taken just after a coffee break.



If you are a teacher and go to parties and people say I hated math..... you need to investigate this post.

If you need to know anything about using literacy in a Math Class Darren created Scribeposts. He has influenced many teachers to follow suit. They are amazing tools to make classes take ownership over their work. Students scribe what happened in class that day and add illustrations and animations to reinforce their work. Thanks Darren.

Darren wrote a chapter for the upcoming Coming of Age: An introduction to the NEW world wide web wide web. It is an amazing read. Distributed Teaching and Learning deals with using Web 2.0 in classrooms, pedagogy and harnessing audience. Please read this post. It was what changed my teaching habits.

I am lucky to call Darren a friend and be able to see him on a regular basis. He lives in the same city as I do and our schools are a mere snowball throw away from each other. My students will be his students. I wonder where he will take them in a few years.

Thanks Darren. I appreciate all you do for education and for your students.