by Donna Miller Fry (@fryed)
Educators have taken up the challenge to do their best to get out and move at least a mile every day for the rest of 2020, and for the very first day of 2021. We can do it! Exercise helps prevent depression. It lengthens telomeres. It prevents onset of Parkinson’s symptoms and Alzheimer’s symptoms. It […]
Pandemic fatigue, anxiety, endless uncertainty, grief, exhaustion. We all feel it. We see it in each other. This is hard. So why move? Especially why should we move right now? Because exercise is one of the most important tools to fight stress-induced depression. Habitual, aerobic and preferably strenuous exercise has remarkable physiological benefits to protect […]
Who inspires you? Last year, my friend and super PLNer Heather Theijsmeijer started something big. I didn’t know about run streaks, but give me a cause, a community, and a plan and I am in. She challenged us to run at least a mile a day for 35 days – November 28, 2019 to January […]
Have you had enough of 2020 yet? I often think of where we were last year at this time. I was getting excited to start #RWRunStreak. I had committed to a birthday marathon in Nova Scotia in May 2020 and a summer solstice marathon in Winnipeg (June 2020). #EducatorsONtheRun was such a fun way to […]
There has never been a more important time to have a strong professional learning network. It is through our connections with others that we find curated resources and ideas. Every day brings more change, more uncertainty, more fear. We are teaching through a crisis. In Manitoba, we are leveraging existing networks and structures to share […]
This September, we need to keep schools safe for children and staff. This is a particularly complex challenge, because we still know very little about the virus causing the pandemic. According to Siddhartha Mukherjee, this SARS-CoV-2 virus became a pandemic because of some very specific characteristics: It is completely new to humans, so we are […]
COVID-19 has turned our world upside down. Schools closed in March. Some of us experienced partial re-openings in June. As we use July and August to plan the next version of school, it is critical that we continue to learn as much as we can about the corona virus, and how to stay safe. Our […]
How do we plan for exceptional distance learning while we are doing it? We have two things going on here. Schools are out, everyone is at home, and we are scrambling to meet the needs of our students right now, while everyone copes with a health crisis and an economic crisis (The Urgency) At the […]
I don’t know the learning needs of our children when their learning moves out of the school buildings. “Content delivery” might work for a few of our students, but real learning requires so much more from us. As Cathy Fosnot taught us, “If there is no learning, there has been no teaching.” As educators, how […]
I’ve spent most of my career advocating for access to high quality learning for everyone, independent of geography or genetics. We have the tools to do this, and the best universities have been giving away their courses for free for decades. It seems strange to me now that decades of research around what great online […]
