 Last spring, Simon Briggspear told Ontario Education leaders that the entire world was waiting to find out what Ontario would do next. He went on to say that leaders need a very clear picture of what they are leading towards. They need to see in their minds exactly what that change looks like that they hope to enable. We were all challenged to find our next thing, what it was, very specifically, that we plan to do next to move our practice forward. At Awesome MOOC, our next was to answer that question, what is your next, Ontario? What can we show the world? We crossed the province, asking education leaders to use digital technology to tell us their next steps, and we put them together here to share with you. So world, here it is, the answer to what's your next, Ontario? Hi, my name is Heather Tysmeyer, and I'm a math and physics teacher on Manitou and Island. My next learn is to reevaluate how I'm going to assess my students in the fall, especially paying attention to rich assessment tasks and really giving them assignments that will take them out into the real world and show off their learning to the world. My next is to see what play-based learning and academic and social success can look like in a JKSK class where poverty, English as a second language, and high turnover rates are a regular school reality. My personal next for the 2015 school year is to create and share more conversations about effectively and creatively using technology to enable student learning. To this end, for my next, I have created a virtual coffee shop section on my blog and committed two time slots per month to record and share conversations via blogging, video, animations, podcasts, and live streaming. I hope you will join the conversation. What's your next? The next step in my learning. I've made a list of five things that I would like to do to connect to my e-learning students and I would like to every day do one of those items and rotate them through so that I can connect to the students and they can connect to me and that's the next step in my learning. What's next? Some reading. John Hattie's latest work and Audrey Waters' work on technology, creating some touch cast interactive videos that are fun and connecting to tinker and play with technology. This year, I'd like to learn a bit more about student access to technology and the use of technology for teaching and learning and improved student achievement. Where and why are our successes happening? I am Brandon Grazley with the Algoma District School Board. I teach computer science online and I often ask my students to write programs and then share them with each other after they've designed them. But my next is going to be to ask students to take somebody else's work and extend it and remix it and try to tap into that maker culture, the hacking of taking something and repurposing it and making something better. The next thing that I'm going to focus on in my practice is feedback. This is something that I'm trying to do in face to face and online and I'm hoping that I can use Google Docs in all its forms and all of its great things that it has in order to do this to make feedback more meaningful and useful, not just for me but for the students. After reading several articles about Google's 20% time and hearing Kevin Broekhauser speak about 20 time projects at our April GAP Summit, I wanted to put a variation of this in place with my team. For the coming school year, we are committing to a once a month half day time block to learn together. Within the time, each person will be responsible for their own self-directed learning plan. The idea of learning independently yet together is to foster conversation, ideas and questions. Hopefully this will be a meaningful endeavor for both individuals and the team. I will share about our experiences via future blog posts. Learning is really important to me and it's tough work but thanks to the work of Steven Katz, I'm exploring my own leadership learning through a leadership inquiry. I want to use the monthly school visits I do as a superintendent to find out how I can influence principals in creating the conditions for collaborative teacher inquiry. It's really exciting because it focuses on my own learning, a use of the Ontario leadership framework and it's deeply personal. That's new for Ontario. What's my next? My next is to innovate with and through the Ontario English curriculum. To reimagine it through the lives of my students, this means student choice in reading and this probably means moving away from the canon. But whose canon should we be accessing in 2015 anyways? Yours? Mine? Or theirs? Can your grant hear doing a bit of app smashing as I share my next? I'm creating a framework for online learning. It's based in part on the design and delivery of a souk with two colleagues out of ISTI. In the souk on UDL and apps, we co-constructed a community of practice with participants. Teachers stayed and they changed their practice. Anyway, back to the framework. I'm currently focused on presence. Social media presence and design presence are the most fascinating to me. My next next will be a deep dive into the UDL and technology aspects of the framework. I'm Chris Tyson. I teach on managerial in Ireland in the rainbow decision school ward. And the next thing that I want to learn to do is use iTunes U to help group together a lot of my resources and expand all the resources that I have from the internet so I can bring it all together for my music students and my classroom. What's my next? My next endeavor is to use social media and other online tools to help my students connect to the world around them and gain a global perspective. Hi, Frank Albano here. I know one thing I'd like to get comfortable with this year is Google Hangout, especially teaching TGJ 3M, the media studies. I think it's beneficial that making that visual connection is huge and the trust is created immediately once that face to face has been established. For me, the next thing is imagination. And by that I mean intentionally creating space in my personal and professional life where I'm committed to looking at the world more deeply with all of my senses and from a variety of perspectives. It's about starting my inquiry with I wonder and what if as opposed to I know. My next step in this three-year process is start at the end. Start with the assessment piece or the method of assessment and work backwards to ensure that I incorporate big ideas and rich tasks into my evaluation scheme rather than small specific assessment pieces. My goal for the next few months is to learn more about coding in order to set up a school coding club using Scratch. I would like to help our students to develop programming skills. This intern will get them to understand the technology they are immersed in and it will develop their thinking and problems of excellence. I would like to start with our intermediate students who will then serve as mentors to the younger ones. I think it will be a very empowering job. It's 2015. Our school was built in 1968. What's my next? Let's go find out. Physical learning spaces matter. How do we intentionally design and shape our physical spaces each and every day to be flexible and adaptable and also working complementary with how we learn digitally? Learning through practice. Learning through students and staff. Physical learning spaces matter. The third teacher. My next step is not so much moving forward as it is staying here and sinking in deeper, exploring in more depth all of the great work that we've already started doing until I can refine my practice to be excellent. Like you, I spent much of my time learning to think with a pencil in my hand. The results of our school learning and thinking were captured on paper that wound up on the teacher's desk. Textbooks and notebooks were both medium and message. While the pencil remains a versatile tool that influences our thinking, we need learners to be agile with a variety of tools. Today's learners have the potential to easily create and manipulate documents, photos, audio and video files, and these are developed across a variety of different devices and in a variety of non-paper formats. The work of their learning no longer simply translates into stacks of paper on a teacher's desk. As our learning and our working flow more easily from one medium to another, how will this affect the flow of our thinking? How must we adjust our learning over the next three years in support of a smoother thinking flow? Changing the conversation was a kind of a nice paradigm to talking about educational change because we've had things come and we've had things go. And I pondered that a little bit and thought, okay, in terms of what we're doing with Chromebook Project, and we certainly saw it in the interviews today. This is fundamentally changing the conversation in the school. This, like no other initiative I've ever seen, has changed the way people not only interact in their classroom but interact with their colleagues, interact with the school board office, interact with the administration, and it is a fundamental sea change in how we do business in schools today. So in terms of seeing maybe what happens next with this project, do you have any final comments? In terms of what, from the system level, or yeah, this to me is one of those experiments that has been so successful right from the beginning that it would be my hope that this would map out not only for the next four years and afterwards for kids that come to my school, but that other schools take a look at what's going on and are caught up in the same wave, and that it's not too far into the future before every grade nine kid walking into a school in the Waterloo Region District School Board gets their Chromebook on their first day of school, and it just becomes a natural part of what happens in education in this part of winter. This year I'm really intrigued by the research that was done last year by Stephen Katz and his team around superintendent learning, and I'm wondering if we can use that study, that research, to better understand how we can transform the learning of education leaders through the use of technology, particularly here in the North, where it's really challenging to collaborate face to face. And then I'm wondering if once we really understand how technology can transform our own learning, if that will translate into a better understanding of how we can do that for our students in the classroom. We hope awesome sampling of Ontario's next has been informative, insightful, and thought-provoking. Personal and professional reflection and goal setting are important to keep change moving forward. In the moment of now, what is your next?