Hello, I’m Dan

It’s been almost a year since I last wrote. During that time, I wrote drafts of my last blog post any number of times. I never seemed to have the time to finish my thoughts. Almost six years ago when I started, there were just a handful of educational bloggers. It was fun, a smallish community that continuously bounced ideas and discussions off one another. Today, it has become an amazing vast wonderland of people sharing ideas, tools, etc. Then Twitter made it expand in an unbelievable way.

As it expanded and my time became more limited as I took on more responsibilities, jobs, and kids (up to three now), I didn’t feel I had as much to offer to this big conversation. I had wanted to do a weekly cool tool update, but weekly wasn’t realistic. I sort of got lost along the way of what I wanted to share. When it came down to it, I was most successful as a blogger when I wasn’t doing any real planning or trying to shape a specific message. I just wrote about what was going on – tech projects I was working on, presentations I was doing, cool lesson plans that worked, and any larger educational issues that were affecting the classroom. That was enough for me and anyone who passed through.

A lot has changed in the last year in education as a whole and in my little educational world (new principal, new classes, a stint as the accreditation coordinator, more PBS work, etc.). I think I could start pondering again out loud. I’ve scaled back my “outside” responsibilities and look forward to a summer thinking about what I’m going to be teaching. In the fall, I’m going to really get to focus on teaching my classes (AP World and Photography – added last year). Something I haven’t really had an opportunity to do in about three years.

So this is not the farewell I have attempted to write, but a reintroduction. See you around.