I’ve learned that the blogging can be a blessing and a curse.

I’ve learned that a good group of friends cannot be replaced.

I’m a special ed. teacher at a high school in Mississauga, Ontario Canada and have worked with “at-risk” kids for many years. What have I learned or more precisely what have I had to relearn. I’ve relearned that my “at-risk” students can teach me a lot about being a better teacher if I’m willing to listen and take some risks. Just because it’s always be done one way doesn’t mean that it has to continue to be done that way and that I need to think big, start small and do it now.

As an educator, I’ve set up a few wikis for different purposes. You can see some of them at mmeh.wikispaces.com/ , oberonweb20.wikispaces.com/ , and france-spain.wikispaces.com/ . I’ve been working hard at turning on my colleagues to the notion of what a useful took the wiki is, and it’s been slow. It disappoints me that more educators are not as deeply fascinated with web 2.0 technologies, but I am pretty confident that they will all be using them eventually.

This is a great reflective exercise Larry. Thanks!

1. “Life is a series of compromises to less than satisfactory situations” (a quote from a favorite teacher). So true! What we dream of / hope for / plan / expect may not happen, but instead of shutting down and wasting time on disappointment, it’s far better to modify our dreams / hopes / plans / expectations and continue to move forward.

2. “As we get older, we feel the same as always inside our head, but the rest of us doesn’t always cooperate” (what someone told me when I was in high school). I’m amazed that I continue to believe, on some level, that I can still do things that were routinely possible five, ten, twenty years ago. All I have to do is try—and then I realize that while my mind is usually as active as it ever has been, my mobility and flexibility and general physical abilities are not: I’m slower and less capable of major multi-tasking, and I have far less stamina than I once did.

3. Learning languages is both exhilarating and frustrating. Isn’t it wonderful (and isn’t it mind-blowing?) that it’s often possible to say something in one language but not in another? Isn’t it amazing (but also maddening) that many things can’t be directly translated from one language to another? Isn’t it wonderful (and isn’t it terrible?) that what is logical in syntax differs greatly from one language to another? Isn’t it interesting (and also mystifying) how some sounds are more or less universal yet others are very language-specific?

4. As we get older, we gradually accumulate an enormous amount of trivia—some of which ends up being useful, some of which is only interesting.

5. We’re lucky if we have even one true friend.

6. Family ties are everything.

I learned to be more confident in my ability as a teacher.

I have also learned to quickly build rapport with students and make another teachers classroom my own for the day.

I am a teacher with nine years of experience teaching PreK who recently got my elementary licensure and is currently subbing.

What I learned this year.
1. The importance of my personal learning network along with my professional development using tools such as Skype, Twitter and Ning.

2. I need to be less passive and actively participate in writing and commenting on other edtech writers’ ideas rather than spending so much time just reading in my RSS reader for a true read/write web2.0 experience.

Thanks for doing this list!