After nice, long, relaxing summer of traveling, spending quality time with family and friends, and lots of excellent eating (all essential qualities for the perfect summer, in my opinion), I am definitely ready to start another exciting school year! And lucky for me, it’s already shaping up to be totally amazing…

I’m so excited to be back because, among other things, I have some fantastic new colleagues:

Jeff Utecht is our new ES Technology and Learning Coordinator, Tara Ethridge is our new ES Librarian, Chrissy Hellyer just signed on to teach grade five and Chad Bates is our new MS Technology and Learning Coordinator. It’s hard to believe I could actually be so fortunate to work with these superstars every single day!

It’s also refreshing (and so much less stressful) to be coming back to ISB for the second year. As much as I love international school teaching, the first year in a new place is always overwhelming – new city, new school, new home, new students, new language, the list goes on and on. While I truly love the daily adventure of living and working overseas, it really does take a whole year to feel like you actually understand the intricacies of a new job, let alone life in a new country.

Returning for the second year also gives me the opportunity to refocus my priorities. As much as I enjoyed my year last year, and as happy as I am with the work I did, the summer holidays gave me time to reflect on exactly how I worked. Although it may seem strange, what I want to focus on this year actually has nothing to do with technology, it has to do with my work process. Instead of focusing on the number or type of projects as a goal for the year, I would like to refine, improve and streamline the way I get my job done.

With that in mind, I’m definitely coming back to ISB with new priorities:

Focus: I think we all know what it’s like to get caught up in one problem after another throughout the day – constantly feeling like all we’re doing is putting out fires instead of taking time for planning, organizing and putting in place thoughtful infrastructure and systems. At the end of the school year, I was exhausted and I’m realizing that, in order to be more productive in an efficient way, I need to make an effort to be more deliberate, to focus on what’s genuinely important (rather than just what seems to be urgent). To help remind me, I’ll be posting Steven Covey’s time management matrix on the wall right above my work space.

Simplify: Along those lines, I want to keep things simple – start projects off small, and build, if all goes well to help ease teachers into working with technology. After having so much success with the super simple Blog Pals project in third grade last year, I’m realizing that trimming major ideas down to just the basics not only makes things easier to manage, but also helps build teacher understanding about how and why these types of experiences are important to students. The simpler the start, the easier it is for teachers to take a risk and try something new, and the more positive experiences they have with technology, the more risks they’ll be willing to take.

Connect: With an ES staff of over 70, it was impossible to complete a project with every single teacher last year, which means there are quite a few teachers I didn’t work with at all. This year I want to make sure I not only continue building relationships with the teachers I worked with last year, but also to connect with those I missed. I would love to be able to bring together the more experienced teachers with those that have never tried a technology rich project before. It’s always amazing to see the wealth of experience and expertise within schools that often goes untapped. Hopefully, by building connections and relationships between teachers we will see more sharing of ideas, collaboration and the successful spread of quality learning with technology.

Of course, I can already tell that saying I’m going to slow down will be a lot easier than actually doing it. Even after just one week of school, there are already so many events in the pipeline that I think this year may end up being even busier than the last.

First up, I’ll be presenting 3 sessions at Learning 2.008 in Shanghai mid September, then I get the privilege of developing a presentation with the amazing Jennifer Wagner for the K12 Online conference in October, next, if I can possibly manage it, I’d love to develop a presentation for the Mobilize This! online conference later in October, plus I’m already gearing up to head back to Doha for another consulting trip to Qatar Academy thanks to the wonderful Julie Lindsay. And, of course that doesn’t count the friends that are (as usual) lining up for a visit to tropical Thailand sans hotel fees.

Slow down? Focus? Simplify? Phew! I’m already exhausted and it’s only the end of week one!