Living out Loud

"Your resume is something you write as you go, not at the end. Live out loud! We need to celebrate our learning publicly!"

"Perfect is the enemy of done. Start. Help each other! If you wanna learn, you have to learn right beside them!" - Kevin Honeycutt

On May 17, 2016, I was fortunate to attend the OCDSB Digital Learning Symposium. The keynote speaker was Kevin Honeycutt. If you don't follow him on Twitter, start now!

In a quick review of the twitter feed from the day (#DLAchat), I pulled the best bits of advice, thoughts and inspiration that got most of us really excited - they are sprinkled throughout in purple. All really great words to inspire and live by, but the ones that got me going were Live out Loud!


If we really care about education, and the future for our students, we need to be public about the amazing things we are doing and share them with the world. I had been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a few years, but put it off - not enough time, too many other writing projects, or just too busy. Last month as I got near 1000 twitter followers, I decided it was a sign. Once I tipped over, I would start the blog. That was on May 30th, not too bad! When I started on Twitter (@rcollishaw), I was researching and writing a social science textbook and just coming across so many amazing resources, I had to share with SOMEONE, but it was often late at night, or early in the morning and definitely NOT at a PD event or conference. I set a goal to tweet once a week, found new colleagues and communities around the world, became more connected with colleagues in my own backyard, and never looked back.

Don't marry tools in education, date them. Don't get thrown by change. Follow the herd and adapt.

I started "dating" my website/wiki well before I started on Twitter, mostly as a way to share with students and parents what was going on in the classroom so students could "catch up" when they were away, and have a place to find lost worksheets. It then became a sort of repository of my work. I would just restart the next semester and more or less use it as my planner, and change things as I went. THEN I started sharing with other teachers, or rather they started finding my site and letting me know how grateful they were for it when THEY were starting a new course. If a teacher asked me how I was teaching something, I could just refer them to the website. It's not pretty, it's not web 2.0, some of the links are old and broken, but it was functional and did mostly what I needed it to do for a lot of years.

For the last several years, I've been feeling like I needed to upgrade, migrate my work to a newer, slicker site that could do more and be more, but the job was daunting - more than a decade of work! My pedagogy has moved on - what should I dump? What should I keep? Is it still useful to others if it's not in keeping with my own beliefs anymore?

When I moved into a coaching role, the time came to break up with my website - don't worry, we'll still be friends, I'll do what I can to mend the broken links or make it work when people ask, but my education life is moving on, as a coach, it's useful to have a story to tell, to refer people to. Not the nuts and bolts, teachers can figure that stuff out on their own, and usually want to personalize it anyway, but the big picture stuff. The ideas, the inspiration, the examples of when we do better our students, and can see bigger possibilities for our own practice. The things that bring the joy back into education.

Success is hard work, dedication, time, and hanging out with people who want the same things you do.

I hope you will hang out with me virtually as I explore the inspiration all around me - from my coach colleagues, the teachers and students I work with in schools and the things that keep popping up from my own practice.

So thanks, Kevin Honeycutt, for the challenge and the inspiration! Here goes!

The schools I see that are farthest behind were farthest ahead
 ten years ago, and fell in love with themselves

Perfect is the enemy of done. Start. Help each other! If you wanna learn, you have to learn right beside them! - Kevin Honeycutt

The tra-digital mini-jam to close it out!