Today is the last day of the 2013 – 2014 school year for me. Honestly, last year was one of the toughest years of my career and this year was one of the best.

I started teaching in September of 1993 at the Abu Dhabi International School. I was 23, I had graduated from university in May, was married at the beginning of July and moved overseas in August. It was a big year. Outside of a few trips as teenagers to the US with our own families, neither my wife or I had ever really traveled outside of Canada before, but we had new education degrees and no jobs so when an offer came in, we jumped.

It was exciting, scary and fascinating all at once.

After moving back to Canada, my wife and I both managed to get jobs in our home town of Snow Lake, MB and we’ve been here ever since.

I only realized this morning, on the last day of school, that this was the end of my twentieth year of teaching. Over that time I’ve taught grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 11. I’ve mostly worked as an elementary or middle years classroom teacher but I’ve also served as a curriculum consultant and as a subject specialist high school teacher.

I was thinking back on that first last day of school. About how excited I was to have survived the year. I was thinking about the changes I’ve seen and the challenges that education, teachers and classrooms are facing. So here is my “after twenty years” list:

- After 20 years I still love teaching and kids. While we all have good days and bad days, there have been very few days when I rolled out of bed and thought I should be doing something else.

- After 20 years I’ve learned that education is constantly in a state of crisis. When I first started it was whole language teaching that was “ruining” education for kids. It moved from there into problems with employability and now we are into challenges around technology and innovation. While I am a huge believer that education needs to be continually changing to stay relevant, I think we are going to survive.

- We are all human. I’ve seen a lot of bad things in 20 years as a teacher. Situations at schools, with homes and families which should never take place. Most teachers can probably say this. I’ve met teachers who change kids’ lives and teachers who simply collect a pay cheque. Education is most of all a system built by humans with all of our mistakes and imperfections. We all need to be patient with kids, teachers and our systems.

- Kids and families are changing for the better and for the worse. I’ve seen amazing kids pass through the doors of our buildings. Talented, passionate people who excel in many different areas. I’ve also been yelled at by parents who felt that I had harmed their child in some way. Parenting and teaching are tough tasks in our society right now and we all need all of the support that we can from each other to help kids to grow into successful people.

- It is an exciting time to be alive. Technology, knowledge, connections and possibilities no matter who you are or where you live seem to be everywhere. I work as a classroom teacher in a small town in the middle of nowhere, but I’ve also spoken at international conferences, managed communities of learners, been connected with universities and research centres and learned entirely new fields of high tech knowledge. I’m currently living in Snow Lake and partnering with a teacher in Virginia to develop learning resources for a company in California. (I love the internet!) Learning in many ways is the centre of my life and I love to help kids to see that they are in no way limited by their geography.

- The physical stuff of education: books, buildings, supplies and technology is getting to be a larger and larger challenge. Who pays for it all? How do we pay for it? What is worth paying for? Is this model sustainable? A strong, well financed public education system is a great achievement of technologically advanced, democratic modern societies. The cost of ignorance is much higher than teaching salaries and supplies. We need to find a way to make this all work.

So there’s my 20 year list. Anyone else want to add to it? What’s on your list?

I can have no complaints about the technology that I have available in my classroom. Through dollars from my school division and different grants that I have managed to win, we have a full slate of tools available to use. Big items I have include:

- 20 Windows laptops (with some of my students bringing their own machines from home, this makes us a 1:1 classroom)
- cameras that can be used to shoot stills or video
- 6 sets of Lego Mindstorms robots
- A Printrbot Plus 3D printer
- 5 mini Android tablets
- Headsets with microphones

On top of all of this hardware, I also have an online classroom community, Google drive accounts, wikis, blogs, a flickr account and a stable of software.

Even though I have access to all of these tools, each year, I try to renew and expand what I have available for students to use and learn from. Working in a small school, I need tools for a lot of different levels, kids and courses. I teach grade 7/8 for most of my time, but I also teach a few highschool tech courses and work with  kids who are interested in programming, animation and electronics. I don’t have a separate makserspace, and I need to be aware of safety issues and ventilation. This does place some limits on what we can do.

All of these factors have led me to focus my tech purchases for next school year in a few places.

1.) Printrbot Plus upgrades and filament – Brook Drumm and Printrbot have really impressed me this year. Beginning as a kickstarter project, Printrbot is growing into a company committed to education and open hardware and software. These are values I support and agree with. Besides this, Printrbot makes a great product at a reasonable price. Once we got through our setting up and the “getting to figure out how this machine actually works” phase, my printer hums along steadily with few problems.

2.) Arduino Starter Kits - I’ve got students who are interested in programming and electronics. While I’m not an expert on these topics, I’m learning on my own, buying books, taking MOOC’s, and most importantly, playing. My summer goal is to spend more time with these specific topics. I actually bought one of these starter kits for my own 14 year old son this year and I recommend them as a great place to get started.

3.) Polargraph – I learned about Polargraphs on twitter and was instantly interested. The possibilities of tying art, programming and electronics together was too much to resist. I made contact with Sandy Noble, the man behind Polargraph and was even more convinced that this tool would be a great addition to my classroom.

4.) Arduino Robot – This is one I considered long and hard. I’ve got Mindstorms robots, but I needed something for more advanced students to work with. I wanted them to have more control over the programming components. As well, with Arduino, we can add shields and boards of our own to expand the capabilities of this machine.

5.) Smart Citizen Station – Living in a small, remote community, we actually don’t have a local weather station. We have to get our weather forecasts and information from a larger community two hours away from us. The Smart Citizen station will allow us to place a small, solar powered station of our own which will monitor temperature, pressure, humidity, noise and other factors. We can publish the results online and monitor everything from a web space or an app.

6.) Odds and Ends – On top of these more major items, I’ve bought some electronics supplies and tools, small, more consumable pieces we can use on a host of different projects.

These are the pieces of tech that I am adding for the upcoming 2014 – 15 school year. I hope that they keep the focus on making, on coding, on building and problem solving. I want these to be some of the main themes that kids get in my classroom.

While I try to be open, honest and transparent with my sharing on this blog and with my thoughts on education, I rarely write about my actual school. I do this mostly out of respect for the kids in my classroom and for my employer. Sharing and openness need to have limits when it comes to kids, families and the people I work with.

But of course there are always exceptions to the rule and this post is one of them. My school is searching for a principal. Our principal is moving to a different school in a different community. He wants to get back in to the classroom. I have no problem with this. In fact, I applaud him for being gutsy enough to give up the “power” of administration and realizing where he wants to work.

Several years ago, when the principalship at my school was last open, I applied for the job. I had actually wanted to move into administration for a number of years. I had completed my master’s degree and my administration courses. In a small community and a small school, these opportunities don’t come around very often so I jumped and applied. I was widely expected to get the job. But I didn’t. Fair and square, for whatever their reasons might have been, the hiring committee didn’t give me the job.

Of course I was hurt. I had applied for the job so obviously I wanted it. When I didn’t get it, it took some soul searching. I had wanted to break into administration for a number of years and now the chance had come and I had been passed by.

When the job came open again this time, I read the ad, took a few days to think about and then – did nothing.

In the two years since the last time the job had come open I learned something. And that something is that I love kids and teaching. I always knew that I enjoyed teaching. I’ve been at it for almost 20 years. Kids make me laugh some days and on others they make me cry. I love to see a face light up when something new finally sinks in and I love to see them challenged. I’ve learned in the past two years that I would rather spend a frustrating math class with a group of kids who are struggling with a concept than I would spend it fighting with a bus schedule or some other item of administration. I am not an administrator and I’m OK with that.

I started teaching in September of 1993 and my classroom today is unrecognizable from that time. I’ve still got kids and desks and tables, but I’ve got a whole host of new and different tools that take us in different directions, bring us into contact with other people and let us be curious about things we never could be in the past. Anyone who tells you that teaching and classrooms never change isn’t trying hard enough.

In the time that I’ve been heavily involved with edtech, a lot of the people I started working with as classroom teachers have moved into other jobs. They are consultants and coordinators and administrators and directors of all different kinds. Some of them have left education altogether and are working in the private sector or have completely dropped out of sight. I wish them all well in new and different roles.

But I’m going to stay in my classroom with all its struggles, warts and limitations. I think it is important that people with experience working with technology, with twenty first century curriculum design and who are willing to take chances with kids stay there. We need to find ways to keep passionate teachers in classrooms with kids.

Classroom teachers need to keep sharing what they are doing. We need to keep pushing open the doors of our learning spaces. Assignments need to be shared and critiqued, videos need to be shot and pictures need to be taken for us all to see. We need more teachers sharing their work at conferences and webinars. We need good assignments and curriculum examples for us all to see and learn from. We need more collaboration between classrooms, kids and teachers.

I turned 44 a few weeks ago and I expect to be able to retire from teaching in about 11 years. My hope is that things will change even faster over that time and I’ll have even more opportunities to teach and learn with others around the world.