You can look at my past year's predictions and decide for yourself if I am any good at it. 

2007: The Year of the Network (Can we say Twitter and Facebook)

2008: The Year of the “Live Web (Ustream.tv and other services take off)

2009: Bringing Social Learning to the Masses (Education goes deeper in understanding social connections)

2010: The Year of the Mobile Web (iPad, Android, iPhone do I need to say more?)

2011: The Year of the QR Code (These little buggers start showing up everywhere)

This coming year though I have a feeling we're not going to see a lot of new technologies but rather the integration of technologies and a continued move to the mobile platform. Much like 2009 we will go deeper into finding ways the technology that already exists can and will effect our lives and education.

Mobile:

This is an easy one to predict as everything is headed this way. I saw two rural village children last week here in Thailand (children who literally live in the middle of the forest on the Burma boarder) with smartphones. Make sure your blog and school website look good on mobile devices. There are all sorts of plugins out there to make sure they do so no excuses. It might be time to start tracking, if you aren't already, the mobile views to your blog, website, or school sites. Here at The Thinking Stick 15% of the traffic over the past year came from some sort of mobile device.  

Integration:

We have a lot of technologies that will continue to be integrated. Of course devices are leading the way. Android integrates with Google. Kindle Fire with Amazon. Nook Reader with Barnes & Noble. The devices integrate deeply with the content of those sites.

The next step in 2012 will be to integrate across platforms. The Kindle Reader is a good example as it's on every device it can possibly be on. 

We'll also continue to see integration across websites. Facebook and Google+ Integrating? Maybe. We'll see sites emerge that allow use to bring more things together in one place. More access, more information, more creation. The tools are out there now it's time to integrate them, pull them together all in one useful way. 

We'll see this within the home as well. In 2012 TVs and the Internet will finally merge and become the norm for new Television sets. You're phone or iPad will become a remote for the television and you'll be able to browse all sorts of media on that 54inch screen in your living room. None of this is new technology, it's all out there and it's already in use....we're just going to see it start to become mainstream in 2012. By next year this time it will be hard to find a TV without a built in WiFi connection.

The Chrome Browser will lead the integration way on the web

If I was predicting the future...wait.....I am. Then I'd predict that the Chrome Browser becomes the ultimate integration device. It runs online and offline apps, and can have deep integration into OS systems. I already spend a good 95% of my time in the Chrome browser and it's apps....and I think we're just beginning to see where this new browser based world is taking us. A couple of weeks ago Google announced that Chrome can now run web engines for video game makers so we'll soon be seeing video games in the browser as well. The more Google can have you play and work inside the browser the more the Google ChromeBook becomes an interesting mobile device. Keep your eye on Chrome and if you haven't converted your web browsing life there yet....it might be worth a try. Take the Chrome Browser in a years time and stick it on that WiFi enabled television and 2013 is looking pretty connected.

So that's it for 2012....we'll see things get faster, sleeker, and integrate more deeply. We'll continue to expect to be connected everywhere we go and expect our mobile speeds to be as fast as our home speeds. More "things" will become WiFi enabled; Cars, Appliances, toys, homes. All setting the stage for a not to distant future of a completely connected life.

It has been a few weeks since we were in a virtual school situation here in Bangkok. Although the flood water continues to slowly move South into Bangkok our school has reopened with no immediate threat to flooding in sight if at all.

SOME RIGHTS RESERVED BY MITH17

Some rights reserved by mith17The school was closed for a week, along with all schools in the Bangkok area, by the Ministry of Education. ISB is lucky in did not get hit by the floods. Not all International Schools were as lucky.I have done presentations throughout Asia on preparing for school closure as it seems they follow me where ever I am in the world. Saudi Arabia with terrorism, Shanghai with Typhoons, Bangkok with riots and flooding, and even Washington State with snow and earthquakes. Depending on the situation many times schools try to move into an virtual school situation. Here are some things that no matter why the school closes seem to be factors in having a successful virtual school experience.Blended Classrooms to Virtual Classroom is an easy Transition  Those teachers who use technology on a daily basis in a blended classroom environment have the best success when it comes time for virtual school. The technology is already in place and more importantly the students know where to go to find information and what the expectations are. The students and educators who struggle the most are those who have to try and set up the technology at the last minute….it just doesn’t work.

Virtual work isn’t Homework Virtual work is different than homework and both educators and students need to understand this. Many teachers not being trained as online educators have a hard time understanding what kind of work can be done other than just “busy work” or homework type of assignments. Creating lessons that are interactive, that are deeper in meaning then what educators are use to giving online is PD time worth spending.

Videos are Good Students like videos. They really like videos that their teachers have taken the time to make. Quick 3 to 5 minute videos (no longer then 10 minutes at the most) seem to always get high marks for students. A good YouTube video isn’t bad, but there’s something about a teachers touch that kids still enjoy.

Preparing Students for the Future

Lastly I think every school should follow the lead of Idaho and require every high school student to take classes online as a graduation requirement. If for no other reason than to prepare them for the university that awaits them. The lastest research from universities shows that online classes in undergraduates is still on a very steep raise with over 500,000 more undergrads taking at least one online course last year than the year before.

According to the Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States, 2011 report, university presidents view online learning as a very significant part of their future school plans, which means more and more students will be taking classes online. The key finding in the report were:

• Over 6.1 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2010 term, an increase of 560,000 students over the previous year.
• The 10% growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 2% growth in the overall higher education student population.
• Thirty-one percent of higher education students now take at least one course online.
• Reported year-to-year enrollment changes for fully online programs by discipline show most are growing.
• Academic leaders believe that the level of student satisfaction is equivalent for online and face-to-face courses.
• 65% of higher education institutions now say that online learning is a critical part of their long-term strategy.
• There continues to be a consistent minority of academic leaders concerned that the quality of online instruction is not equal to courses delivered face-to-face.

With the economy where it’s at, online schooling also makes fiscal sense for many families. As a university student you can take your classes and still live at home saving anywhere from $10,000 on up in room and board cost.

If we believe that part of our job as educational institutions is to prepare students for their future then I believe we need to prepare them to learn online.

Accomplishments:

by Aidan Jones

First and foremost are the relationships I’ve built this first year. This really is the foundation to a Technology Integration position. Whether your first year in a school or just a new division building relationships, understanding the systems, and building trust and confidence with the facutly is in essential part to the first year.  

I feel I had an advantage coming into the high school this year as teaching the CoETaIL Program for two years at ISB allowed me to meet and collaborate with faculty from all three divisions. So transitioning into the high school, I wasn’t coming in as an “unknown” person from the elementary. It helped that I had some established relationships but I still had to “prove” that I knew what I was doing in the high school. Overall, I feel like I’m getting into departments more and have laid some great ground work to take the use of technology to a new level next year.

Building on the back of those relationships I was able to support teachers in taking some risks and rethinking some aspects of their teaching. Jim Fitzgerald, who I’ve blogged about before, took on the reverse instruction challenge, and we saw great success in redefining the role of the teacher and student engagement. The ideas that we proved posible in his class are now slowly spreading through the rest of the English Department and into other departments as well….a great foundation to build on for next year.

In December I was given 5 minutes at a faculty meeting to talk about technology in the high schol. The timing was right having been able to build relationships first semester and proven myself. I challenged teachers with ideas of small changes they could make that might just lead to great learning gains. One of those challenges was to think through how we have students present information.

Dave Krocker, another English teacher, took on the challenge and together we looked at the presentations students were doing in English class. We decided that there was learning in the process of making a presentation that we were not tapping into and we needed a structure that would make the process of building a presentation powerful. We decided to have the students do Pecha-Kucha presentations. They turned out amazing, and Dave was sold on the power of visual presentations. These presentations led Dave to re-exam other areas and tap into the technology skills that our kids already have, and students ended up producing some amazing products, including this video from Sarah on an interpretation of Romeo and Juliet.

Other accomplishments include continuing to use the blogs as reflecting web-based portfolios in Theory of Knowledge classes and Senior Seminor classes. A great foundation on the use of blogs that we can build on next year.

Failures:

by bjornmeansbear

Ah….the failures. If you’re pushing, thinking, and discovering there are bound to be failures along the way. If you don’t have any failures then you’re not pushing hard enough. 

One semi failure was the wikitionary project we did in English as an Additional Langugage (EAL) class. It sounded good, looked good, but in the end I think it was a failure. The kids weren’t as motivated as I thought, and the wiki community we choose to be a part of was not welcoming to the fact that we had students who were helping to build a wiki for EAL students when they themselves were EAL students. The project become frustrating both for teachers and students. The teacher, asking students to do specific things, soon found out that the wiki community didn’t believe the things she was asking kids to add were appropriate for the wiki. The kids adding things to the wiki would find that before the teacher had a chance to check their work, that the wiki community had deleted their hard work. 

In the end we learned how important it is that you choose to join a wiki community/project that truly supports your learning goals. 

Another failure was the Radio Club for the second year in a row that I have been trying to get started. This year we made some head way in that we actually produced a couple shows and had some fun. The problems started to mount up when our equipment which I had thrown together from pieces around the school (including a computer with a half working screen) started to break. Our sound quality wasn’t very good, and that frustrated the kids as they wanted to create high quality material. Also the promise of being able to be live on the Internet didn’t work out as all the live streaming services were blocked here in Thailand up until about three weeks ago. 

By semster it was getting harder and harder for me to motivate the kids to produce shows, and the core group that stuck with it were all seniors, which meant come Feburary they became focused on graduation and their senior year and the club took a back seat. My goal of producing three quality shows a week turned out to be 13 shows total for the year. I still think we could make a Radio Club fly here at ISB but I have to find a way to get quality audio equipment to create quality audio that the community wants to listen to. All year I’ve been trying to find funds, and hopefully by the start of next year I’ll be able to convince the powers that be somewhere that this is good for kids.

The Future:

The future is bright here at ISB and I’m excited in the direction we’re heading. Our 1:1 program expands next year from Grade 6 this year to Grades 6-8 next year, and then 6-12 hopefully the year after that. 

Our complete adoption of Google Apps for both students and staff will streamline a lot of our communication within the school and with our community.

The continued use of blogs as web-based portfolios as teachers now in 2nd Grade want to start blogging with their students next year. Meaning every student grades 3-12 and half of 2nd grade will be creating a web-based portfolio via their blog. 

The idea of reverse instruction continues to be a conversation in the high school and I’m looking forward to continuing to push teachers to look into it as an option for teaching content outside the classroom.

Personally I’ll stuggle agian to balance my 90% time here at ISB with my consulting and presentation work with schools, organizations and conferences. My calendar for next year is filling up fast and I’ll once again have to walk the fine line between being here for teachers and following my passion for teaching teachers the power of these tools. This year under a 100% contract my life got way out of balance and was unhealthy tipped towards my work. I’ve been able, with the help of a supportive wife, to step back and get refocused these last couple of months. You are only as good as the support system around you and I’m lucky enough to have a strong one!

All in all it was a great first year in the High School. People ask me if I like if better than the elementary. I’m not sure you can compare the two…they are so different as the kids have different skills and are in different place when it comes to using technology in their daily lives. I love all of it…the kids, the thinking, and the learning. As this year comes to a close I’m already excited for what next year will bring.  

I always get excited when national international organizations (members in 45 countries) come out with statements that encourage the use of technology for learning purposes. Partly because my beliefs in the future of education and the tools students need to succeed, but also because it’s one more organization we can lean on as leaders.

The National Association of Secondary School Principals just released a statement advocating the use of Mobile and Social Technologies in Schools. Yes…that’s right….principals are saying we need to use these tools for learning. W00T!

A couple of quotes from the article that I like: 

Yet as mobile and social technologies become ubiquitous, attempts to block them are increasingly ineffective. For example, in schools that prohibit cell phones, 54% of students still report sending texts during the school day (Lenhart, 2010).

In recent years, there has been explosive growth in students creating, manipulating, and sharing content online (National School Boards Association, 2007).

(Love how this quotes 4 year old research)

Nowhere is the vision for the use of mobile and social technologies more clearly articulated than in the National Educational Technology Plan (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). The plan describes new models of teaching and learning in which students and teachers are virtually connected to one another, to colleagues, to fellow students, and to a variety of resources that maximize opportunities for anytime-anywhere learning.

I suggest you sent the article on to your principal no matter where they stand on this issue. Mine will be receiving it tomorrow in their inbox. 

The more I read about what Google launched at Google IO a couple of weeks ago the more I’m convinced that I’m going to continue to love Google and its products as well as where they are taking us into the future. 

3 weeks ago I traded in my iPhone 3G for an HTC Incredible S that had just been released in Taiwan and I haven’t looked back. The speed, the form factor, the 8MB camera on the back and 1.3MB camera on the front…and an open platform. 

I bought my wife an HTC Desire a year ago and we both fell in love with it. It was my wife’s first Smartphone and she was nervous at first about figuring it out. 2 weeks later she couldn’t live without it. 

When it comes to Android what I love is that because it’s open-source companies can take the base product and put their own spin on it. I love what HTC has done with their HTC Sense interface on top of Android, it really gives it a polished finish that rivals any iPhone. 

I also like the idea of widgets that you can put on the screens. I’m all about reducing my clicks, and having my calendar, contacts, and friend stream always open saves mini-seconds of time throughout the day that add up. 

But what I think excites me most about Google and Android is the future. 

At its recent Google IO conference they talked about Android@Home where they are releasing open APIs that companies can use to build into their home products like refrigerators, light switches, sound systems, etc. If companies adopt the standard then smart-appliances are in our not to distance future….and again because Android is open it basically could runs in the background allowing each company to put their own look and feel to the user interface (UI)

Then there is what Google continues to do with automobiles. We already know they have a car that can drive itself, but now they’re partnering with Ford to make our cars even smarter. 

Open Wins

Google has shown again that creating open platforms in the long run win out. There are now more Android phones in the US than iPhones and it’s predicted that by July there will be more Android apps than iPhone Apps. 

Then there’s the app building piece which, I’m not sure if they did this on purpose or not but looks and acts a lot like Scratch the MIT game building software.

So a school could have a computer game building class one year and the next year have an App building class where the skills build on each other (please tell me there are schools out there doing this?).

Wikipedia beat Encarda, Linux is the backbone of the Internet, Blogs beat newspapers, and Twitter is taking down nightly news.

In the long run open wins, it gives people choice and allows for creativity. 

The Importance of Failing

I also love the fact that Google takes chances and fails…and not little chances…big chances. Google Wave, Google TV (so far), Google Buzz, all products that Google hasn’t had a hit with…and that’s OK. 

When you’re pushing, when you’re being innovative, you’re gonna have failures….and I for one like to celebrate those. Good companies (and teachers) can fail big, get back up and try something else.

Constant Beta

I really wish I could convince educational leaders in this notion (as I wrote here). Google products are always in constant Beta. They still make somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 tweaks to Google Search. Google Docs is constantly getting updates and tweaks, and the same goes for Chrome, Maps, Android, and most other products. They are constantly innovating, seeing what works what doesn’t. Building on the positive and throwing out the negative. 

Teachers do this daily with their students, constantly adjusting to student needs, what’s working, what’s not….however are we doing it at an organizational level? Or is education “good enough” and we’ll continue to build curriculum like we’ve always done.

I’m excited for the future….I don’t know where all this is going, what my home will look like in 5 years, what this device I’m typing on will look like in 5 years….but I’m excited to see where it’s all going to lead. 

Kevin Kelly co-founder of Wired magazine took the stage recently at a Web 2.0 event in San Francisco. In his keynote he discussed the 6 Trends he believes will affect our connected word. He broke these 6 trends down into 6 verbs (actions).

What are your thoughts on these? What do these mean for schools and our students?

• Screening — Kelly notes that whereas there used to be just the television screen and then the computer screen, now screens are everywhere. And increasingly, everything will be a screen — all surface. There will be a “one screen for all,” Kelly says.

• Interacting — Right now, interaction is limited mainly to our fingertips, Kelly says. But the iPad is changing that — it’s about using more of your body now. And going forward, things like gestures, voice, cameras, and other things in our technology will transform the way we interact with everything. And yes, he brought up Minority Report.

• Sharing — While most people think of this right now as the top level social ideas, “we’ve just begun this process,” Kelly notes. The self-tracking of everything we do is now coming into play, he notes. This includes location, realtime pictures and videos, etc.

• Flowing — “We’re now into a new metaphor for the web,” Kelly says noting that we started with the desktop on computers, then pages for the web. Now the realtime stream connected to the web is the thing.

• Accessing — We’re moving to a world where it’s about accessing information and media and not owning it. We see this now with the rise of Netflix, but soon that will fully hit the music space too.

• Generating — “The Internet is the world’s largest copy machine,” Kelly says. Going forward, there will be an importance placed on things that cannot be easily copied. A key to this is an easy way to pay and content that is hard to copy. Immediacy is a key — if you want something right now versus when it can be copied. Personalization is another key, he says.

Via TechChunch

I haven’t read the whole article but some of the quotes that Fast Company have are pretty interesting.

There are about 25 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people in the least developed countries (LDCs), according to theInformation Economy Report 2010. That’s up from just 2 per 100 a few years ago.

From 2% to 25% in a year…..is it just me or is that some rapid growth?

But not all is rosy. The report warns that the opportunities are “unevenly distributed and not always sustainable.”

Yes…but with growth rates like that and no sigh of it stopping I think this will even out. When I was in Laos I witnessed this first hand. In some of the rural areas we hiked through whole villiges would chip in to by a cell phone. It was their connection to the villages round them and into the city to find work and a market for their goods.

I’ve been saying this for awhile now. The future is in mobile phones. The more I travel the world and see just how connected we are via cell phones the more I’m convinced this will be the true 1:1 device. Now what are we doing in our schools to help those fortunate enough to have a cell phone now prepare to work in a world where potentially everyone is connected?

Last year I predicted that ’08 would be remembered as the year of the “Live Web”. Personally I don’t think my prediction was too far off. We saw many things go live. Ustream.tv and now Stickam.com along with a host of other sites took the web by storm. I found myself watching many events and people live. Towards the end of the year Dean Shareski made Qik a twitter hit broadcasting live events via his cell phone anywhere and anytime he felt like it. We saw many podcast shows start to use live video including Leo Laporte going live with live.twit.tv.

What we need to remember is that all of this technology is very much in its infancy stage and over the next year, I think we’ll only see it improve. On a recent TWIT podcast (one of my favorites) Jason Calacanis talked about in down economic times, companies should not expand but instead build value. I think that’s what we’re going to see from a lot of these Internet companies…not expansion but value building. They will continue to improve their products, make things faster, smoother and sit tight while the world waits to see what will happen economically.

I have a feeling that the same will happen in education. Since 2005 we’ve seen a huge influence of Web 2.0 tools. We early adopters have flocked to them, trying to figure out their value and find out for ourselves what tools can be used in educational settings and which tools ‘stick’ with students and educators alike.

In 2009 I think you are going to see us build value into these tools educationally. I’m not convinced that 2009 will be about the “next new thing” so we (the early adopters) will turn our focus to what we know. The tools, we know, can make a difference in education and we’ll help the masses understand those tools better and how being connected fundamentally changes the way we teach and learn.

Will Richardson has a similar thought about this year:

So, looking forward, I’m still in the same place in terms of where I want to spend more of my energies…not so much on the people who have already showed up, but on the people who don’t know that this production is even playing.

And I think this is 2009 for education. I feel much the same way Will does in that this year is about reaching that next rung of adopters on the adoption ladder. We won’t have a lot of new and cool tools to try and figure out this year so it will be a time for us to build value educationally.

Last year at NECC I asked many of those that were at EduBloggerCon and others I met in the Blogger Cafe what percentage of the 13,000 educators at the conference really “got it”. Everyone, would look around and say outside of those that were at EduBloggerCon…not many.

So if we take the 250 (I think that is the rough number of attendees of EduBloggerCon) out of 13,000. That’s about 2%. That’s 2% of the people who came to an educational technology conference which means these are the educators who like using technology. Will Richardson thinks it’s closer to 5%, and he might be closer to the true number. At any rate…we have some value building to do in education.

Another area within our society I think we’ll see continue to evolve is this notion of “Nearly Now” as Stephen Heppell puts it in the Learning to Change video and in an interesting article at the Guardian.

Let me offer three examples. Once, we simply had two types of time: “now” and “not now”. A school lesson happened “now”. When children talked about what they had done during the holidays they were describing “not now”. But technology has brought us a new time in between those two: “nearly now”.

Twitter hit the main stream this year with FriendFeed having a different way to aggregate the conversation. In 2009 I think we’ll see society continue to explore these tools and this new Nearly Now way of communicating. Does it have value in the classroom? I’m not sure, but this is something I think early adopters in education will continue to explore this year. We know it has value as a learning network device, as an aggregater of information…but for classroom learning….we’ll have to wait and see.

So what’s in store for me in 2009? Well much like Will I want to focus on opening the eyes of that next adopter rung on the latter. I want to help educators understand how open social learning changes the landscape in a way that is oh so powerful and at the same time oh so scary.

My work as the Educational Ambassador for Wetpaint.com is part of this. Just this morning I spent 45 minutes answering questions from those people just getting started using wikis. Everyone from a high school teacher wanting advice on how to run a discussion to a university professor asking for advice on setting up a wiki for her department.

That’s also why this year I wanted to do a 6 hour workshop at NECC 09 on using wikis. 6 hours focused just on wikis and their use in education. We’ll look at wiki projects, create a rubric that people can walk away with, and learn how to build a wiki for use as both a collaborative tool, or just as a class website. I’m excited to get 6 hours to focus and build understanding around the use of this very powerful tool….not with those who already use them, but with newbies or at least those new to wikis.

I also am making it a personal goal to create more screencasts this year. I’m finding them very useful at my school as a way to get quick snippets of information out to staff. I have to work on and find a format that works for me that will allow me to do these in under 2 minutes. I love the way Apple does their quick tip of the week screencasts and hope to follow a similar format to these.

I also see my teaching of the grad course at Plymouth State University as another way to get people into this world. In my course you don’t write an end of the term paper, you write some 30 blog posts that if added up would probably be more writing than a term paper…but the learning is what I’m really after. Most people taking the course are either technology teachers within schools or want to do something with technology. It’s been a great course with a lot of positive feedback. The one complaint I constantly receive is that the first two weeks are very overwhelming.  Imagine having to learn to edit a wiki, write a blog, and set up and read an RSS reader all within two weeks, and many of the students have never heard of some of these tools. Add that in week 7, you have to create a podcast in which I give very little guidance and expect the students to use YouTube videos and other resources to learn the trade of podcasting and you have a tool intense course. I must be doing something right though as one of my former students Kim Tufts has returned as my TA this quarter and will be teaching the course this summer.

I’m also hoping to do more conferences and PD days here in the Asia region (and beyond). More schools will be starting down the path to 1:1 programs (one computer for every student) and with that (I hope) will be some PD to teach teachers how putting this tool in the hands of students does more than allow them to turn papers in electronically and save trees. There are at least 14 international schools that will be going 1:1 in the next two years here in Asia and they’ll need some support both from outside and from within to help make the transition.

So that’s it for my predictions and goals for 2009. Basically it’s time to get our hands dirty and reach a little deeper, find those next adopters in your school and go get them. This goes for administrators as well. Find that administrator and help them see the changes that are happening in our world. This economic down turn is an interesting thing to watch from my apartment in Bangkok. Nobody really knows what it means or how long it will last. My last and safest prediction is that I’m not sure how long it will last, but I have a feeling the world in many ways economically, socially, and globally is going to feel a lot different on the other side of it. It’s time to build value, and prepare for the turn around because when it does….hang on we’re gonna be in a whole new global landscape.

International recruiting fairs start the first of January. Which means schools need to know what jobs to go recruiting for before then. So in December, teachers need to give notice whether or not they plan on returning the following year (depending on your school it’s actually anywhere from November through January). It’s difficult on a couple of levels.

First, you have only been in school for about half the school year and you have to make a decision that will affect you a whole year in advance.

Secondly, most schools make you resign before the recruiting fairs even begin. Meaning there is a period of time when you do not know where you will end up, or even if you will have a job.

Of course the best course of action is to go into your last year at a school knowing it is your last year at that school. You can start the recruitment process early, get registered for a fair, ask for letters of recommendations, and prepare yourself for the move.

Now, that’s how sane people change jobs internationally. How do the insane do it? Well they go weeks getting very little sleep thinking about their future, what they want to do, and if their current school is the right place. They have long conversations as a couple discussing their future.

And then one Monday you say to your wife, “We’re resigning.”

And because she loves you she just says, “OK.”

(FYI: Because you are hired as a couple to international schools you must resign as a couple as well)

We were not expecting this, we were not/are not planned for it. But sometimes you just have to do things. Sometimes there is a voice within you that is stronger than you are and helps push away those fears and allows you to do what you really want to do. My wife left the decision up to me, knowing that there are things I’m wrestling with internally and that it was me that was feeling the need for a change.

Now only if I knew what that change was I wanted.

I announced that I had resigned on twitter this morning and I cannot thank my twitter network enough for their encouragement (and humor) in my decision.

I do not know what I want to do. All that I know is I want to do something “different”. I’m not sure what that is, what that looks like, or feels like at this point, and I’m relatively calm about that which tells me I”ve made the right decision.

Maybe I’ll go play World of Warcraft for a couple months like others have done. Right now I am just loving life and being thankful that I’m in a position that allows me to think outside the box a little, to reflect on what it is I want to do, and how best I can affect change both in myself and within education.

Stay tuned…things just got interesting!

[tags]future[/tags]

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