Skip to main content

About


gif (1).gif
Made using Androidify

Welcome to my blogging journey through the EDUC5205G, Leadership and Technology, course.  My name is Rachel Johnson and I am the Head of Science & Information Technology at White Oaks Secondary School in the Halton District School Board.  I am taking this course as part of my M.Ed. program at UOIT.  I've always loved learning; this is evident based on my prior educational background as I have an Honour's B.Sc. in Biochemistry, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, and a B.Ed.  My mom always used to ask me when I would leave school and get a "real job".... guess that's never going to happen!

Feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions or comments about this blog.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 1: Getting Started

This week marks the beginning of this course. I have to admit that I was pretty excited about taking this class; it relates so much to my role as Head of Science and Information Technology at the school I teach at in the Halton District School Board (HDSB). I also just took “Foundations of Leadership” last semester with Bill Muirhead and I am looking forward to continuing my learning about leadership. I am still fairly new to my role as a department head; this is my second year and I’m finally feeling like I have a better grasp on what my job entails. One of my goals this year is to further build staff capacity around technology in the classroom so I’m hoping to gain a lot of great ideas and learn about various theories that I can implement in my practice. I am also continuing my work on motivating my staff to shift their practices towards more problem-based or project-based learning and I’m eager to learn more about leadership theories and active learning in general. In sett...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 2: The Innovation-Policy Gap

This week's readings were focused on digital privacy.  It is clear from from both Davis (2014) and Leatham & Robertson (2017 ) that there exists some major discrepancies between innovation, the use of technology in education, and policy.  In particular, as I was reading the Leatham & Robertson (2017) article, I began to question my own practices and choices of digital tools in the classroom... do they protect student digital privacy or am I unknowingly putting my students at risk here?  I will certainly be examining the digital tools that I choose much more closely to ensure that this is not the case. I found the following quote from Leatham & Robertson (2017) particularly interesting: "Teachers, and in particular, early adopters appear to be caught in the cross-currents of multiple and contradictory technology imperatives" (p. 3).  This quote really caught my eye because it is linked to the leadership theory that I am working on with my group for Assi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 12: Blue Sky Thinking

I have seen a general theme running through both this course and my practice in my leadership role. Technology leadership, or really any leadership, always comes back to RELATIONSHIPS. Fostering good relationships with staff and students creates a positive environment which is key to gaining trust and buy-in. This, in turn, allows for risk-taking and innovation. As I look back on the course, relationships were seen interwoven throughout the course content. For example, relationships were central to many of the leadership theories that I examined early on in the course. As a leader, using and modelling the use of technology can influence attitudes, as seen in social learning behaviour, which can then influence behaviours. This is linked to the theory of reasoned action, which describes how attitudes as well as norms can influence behaviour. Both attitudes and beliefs about the usefulness of introducing and adopting a new technology will influence the adoption. Communities o...
Post a Comment
Read more