In light of our experimentation with Hoot.me, more grist for the mill.
Getting Started
I set-up the Diigo account. I had never heard of it before enrolling in this course. It seems to be a Delicious-like site on steroids mated to Facebook. Sometimes it all makes me feel like the “web” is too inter-connected and redundant at times. I signed-up for a hotmail account thirteen years ago. I have yahoo account, a gmail account, an ISP account, two different school board accounts and accounts associated with my domain: sumlux.ca.
My usernames and passwords associated to various accounts number in the hundreds. Now I have three more.
Who and Why
My name is Paul Laplante. I spend more time checking the weather than I think I should, but it does give me something to talk about with people when I first see them any time of the day. This is something we Montréalers do. It’s sunny, hot, and a little muggy this mid-August Thursday afternoon. Now that’s out of the way, and you know I hail from Canada let me tell you who I am, and what sumtalk is supposed to do.
First of all, I just enrolled in a MOOC on the subject of online pedagogy. As part of this course, the set-up of a blog is required; hence the page you are looking at. For now that’s the intent of this blog: to fulfill a requirement. I hope it morphs into something more.
The title under my business card says: Pedagogical Consultant. I used to teach adults in Literacy and ESL programs both through School Boards and private companies. I did that for 18 years. Now I provide a consulting service through an association of all the English School Boards in Quebec. It’s a huge geographic area–the entire province of Quebec. The number of English speaking adult learners served by school boards, however is small. Only about 15% of the Quebec population report English as their mother tongue. Most members of this linguistic group reside in the Montreal area.
My mandate in pedagogical support of teachers in the adult sector is to help implement an educational reform which has been in the “roll out” stage for eight years. (Our provincial government has jurisdiction over Education and passes directives regularly about what and how to teach.) As a coordinator of these efforts, I am looking to establish Professional Learning Communities for teachers of the same high school subjects so that they may better cope with the impending curricular and pedagogical overhaul.