On Monday and Tuesday, I spent time with a sizable number of fellow educators at an “Institute” which turned out to be a great disappointment. Life is full of disappointments so the question is always how to make the best of a situation and not emphasize the negative.

Let’s list the positives:

• I got to know two of my colleagues at my school much much better and feel like after this shared learning (yes, some learning did go on) experience that we could support each other in some new initiatives
• I learned about some cool web resources such as Trello and Paper.li
• I learned about a couple of ed-tech websites which published articles for teachers such as Edsurge (click on this link to see Pinterest board Experimental Ideas/Pedagogy)
• I created a couple of resources for a new fairy tale class (a pinterest board and The Fairy Tale Daily on paper.li)
• I fine-tuned a Prezi for tomorrow’s Edcamp DV-IS and created a Pinterest board called Shakespeare Reboot (click on the link to see)

Another thing that happened was I talked to the person who ran the institute about my (our) disappointment. Now this might now seem like much, but I avoid confrontation or hard conversations. They make me stressed and nervous and I doubt my own judgment of the situation. But this time, I felt too strongly about what had happened (actually not happened) and spoke to the person. It ended up being a relatively positive exchange — no acrimony, no defensiveness, no anger and I think we both got something out of it. Thus a positive for me is that I overcame a personal limitation which has stymied me in the past.