I recently began a whole new adventure in life and in teaching. After living in the interior of BC for over twenty years, my family made a huge move this summer. We now live on Vancouver Island and I love it here. I lived by the ocean for many years when I was young, so in many ways, I feel as if I’ve finally come home.

I am very excited to be working in a new job with School District #71 at Navigate NIDES. I’ve known about this school for a very long time as many of the people working there were early adopters of educational technology many, many years ago. I’m super excited to be working with younger children once again (I have a lovely, energetic and insightful class of kids in Kindergarten, Grade One and Grade Two!) and I’m enjoying the professional challenge of updating my practice in this new learning community with new students and the new BC curriculum.

While I expected to love working with the kids every day in this new job, I didn’t expect to love working within the blended learning model so much. One pleasant surprise (although, in retrospect, I don’t know why it’s taken me by surprise…) is how much I enjoy working within a blended learning model. I love working with the students face-to-face in my classroom for part of the week and I love being a teacher facilitating online learning, online portfolios and other technological aspects of teaching/learning for the other part of the week. Even though I’ve never done this exact type of teaching before, I’m really enjoying it for a number of reasons. A good topic for an actual blog post at some point, I think!

Finally, one piece of the new job that feels very familiar (and that I also love) is that I am once again a member of a collaborative team of educators. I can’t say enough about these amazing people. They have been so supportive, answering all my 100s (if not 1000s) of questions, accepting me, helping me and being there when I needed them. I’m humbled by their passion, their knowledge and their motivation to do really cool stuff to inspire kids.

Now that the big family move is finally almost done and life is feeling more settled, I’d like to blog, tweet and post more online as I have in past years. There’s lots to talk about and I know the reflective aspects will help me with this new role and new chapter in life.