Darren Kuropatwa: edu (video) blogger

I have to thank Mike for sharing Darren Kuropatwa's video blog last month on Ning: it was Darren's WhileWalking video about assessment that introduced me to this Curriculum Coordinator for Digital Learning from the St. James-Assiniboia School Division in Winnipeg, MB. 

Darren's blog can be read at adifference.blogspot.com, where he shares stories like his transformative experiences at the Unplug'd educational conference, to the differences between traditional reading & writing and writing with digital text using hyperlinks, or the CJOB radio debate that sparked a blog post about the differences between curriculum and pedagogy. Overall though, what has set Darren apart from other edublogger's for me has been his narrative. He is - first and foremost - a great story teller, and it comes through in everything he speaks about. Please listen to Darren talk about the importance of the narrative and sharing stories with others:

It was actually a week or so after I first began reading through Darren's posts that I realized he hadn't published anything since last August - panicked (I had mistakenly thought that Darren's video was a one-off), it was almost another week before I watched Darren's video on assessment again and was drawn to his youTube channel, where he has continued to share his experiences via his WhileWalking series since last September.

Darren has utilized an app called socialCam to share the videoblogs he creates on his walks to work in the morning - which really showcases his well-spoken, narrative approach to philosophizing on education, technology, and the internet. His most recent vlog discusses the type of questions we can ask our students that aren't 'google-able': questions that don't have a strict knowledge component to them, but rather tap into each students thoughts and beliefs about what the answer may look like. 

While Darren speaks to a number of topics, one of things that really stands out about his blogging is that while he longer is teaching at the K-12 level, he constantly relates his ideas and reflections to (what I would call) real-world teaching moments. 

A great example of this is Darren's post on Evernote (#WhileWalking 77: Evernote For Public & Private Sharing) where he is considering the real world integration of an app into a classroom setting - and he gives a step by step guide of how he would implement it in, and then reaches out to his audience to ask how they may be using that particular piece of tech. 

It is that relatability between tech, educational philosophy and real world pedagogy that sets Darren apart from the field as an edublogger.