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Interesting comments in this blog post by Chris Kennedy, Superintendent of Schools / CEO with the West Vancouver School District (West Vancouver, BC)

" I walk into almost all of our schools in West Vancouver and very often the first thing people want to show me or talk to me about is the changes happening around the library.  Or more specifically, schools are taking great pride in their learning commons spaces that are developing.  While the physical spaces are exciting, the changes to our mindsets are far more powerful.  We are not destined for new schools in West Vancouver anytime soon but the rethink of the library has been both a symbolic and concrete shift in how we think about space and how we think about learning.  The school library - a centre piece in schools - is now the modern hub for learning."

"I've recently had a very useful online chat with Steve Lai in Vancouver about not only the skills and habits but also the mindset required to make iPad teaching successful. I love the way social media connects me to these enthusiastic and talented teachers around the world."

Bored by status quo professional development and stale in service workshops? Why not throw a party! LAN: Learning Is Social is the story of how North Vancouver School District used the presentations of the K12 Online Conference to breathe new life into professional development.

"THE WHOLE WORLD is exhausted. And it's killing us. But particularly me. As I write this, I'm at TED 2019 in Vancouver, which is a weeklong marathon of talks and workshops and coffee meetings and experiences and demos and late-night trivia contests and networking, networking, networking. Meanwhile, I'm sick as a dog with a virus I caught from my 3-year-old, I'm on deadline for what feels like a bazillion stories, and I'm pregnant, which means I need coffee but can't have too much, and need sleep but can only lay on my left side, and can't breathe without sitting propped up with a pillow anyway, since I can't safely take any cold medication. According to neuroscientist Matthew Walker, I'm doing serious damage to my health-and life-by not sleeping enough."

"The internet doesn't come with an instruction manual, but it should-to give users the skills to separate truth from falsehood so they can distinguish between propaganda and the indisputable and confirmable. And colleges should be the place leading students through this reference book. That's the argument of Michael Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, and it isn't just some "hot take" designed to be provocative. He actually wrote the manual. And he has already convinced more than a dozen colleges to adopt it (and more than 100 college libraries to prominently link to it). Recently, he's started research in an effort to prove that it works (and can help preserve American democracy). Plenty of people are talking about the importance of information literacy these days, and many educational institutions see it as part of their mission. And yet it's more complicated than it seems. Earlier this month researcher danah boyd gave a provocative keynote speech at SXSW EDU arguing that media-literacy efforts at colleges are "backfiring," turning out graduates that are good at questioning everything, and selectively believing what their gut tells them is true."

"I have written before (HERE) about the importance of not just moving more, but developing physical literacy skills with students.  This was pre-pandemic. And if anything the limited activity many had during the COVID-19 pandemic increased these challenges leading to what many are seeing as a health crisis. In the world of education, we rightly emphasize intellectual growth, but the significance of physical health cannot be overstated. We are intentionally trying to do this differently in West Vancouver Schools. We are looking at the whole school environment to get students moving more often throughout the day.  For us physical health is not just about sports or fitness; it's a comprehensive approach encompassing mental and emotional well-being, community involvement, and personal development."

Last year, we began a program that can best be described as "classroom modernization" across the district. Our Board of Education recognized the importance and education need for the modernization and made a commitment through its budget to support the purchase of technology to support the professionals in our classrooms. The first decision we made was to ensure all teaching staff had access to a current, mobile device. While often the focus is on ensuring all students have access to current devices (a continuing effort in our district) we realized that if we wanted classes to be engaging with digital tools, teachers needed to have access and feel comfortable with them as well."