Teaching
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Bragging Time – Again
With the first video reflection due this past Monday, I want to share with everyone some of the hard work my kids are doing. These kids are really crushing this project. It is an unbelievably powerful experience to see the excitement from them while they work on this. The following students did a great job…
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Standardized Testing – By Me and Others
It’s testing season, and so I’m thinking about testing a lot. Thankfully, in my state, we are done with English tests. However, I am missing student almost every day for End of Course exams in their various classes. This is very inconvenient for me as a teacher, but way more inconvenient for the students. Not…
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Working on #TEDxWOHS Outside
When I got back to my room from lunch today, a couple of my students point out how lovely the weather is, and say “We should work outside.” I thought about it, and there wasn’t any reason not to. The laptops are charged, and the WiFi extends outside of my classroom. And they’re right, the…
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Bragging Time
We are a week in to our TEDx project, and my students have made their first posts on their blogs. It has been so much fun for me to read their posts and learn a little more about my students and their passions. I have also noticed students who are usually quiet and timid have…
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Everything Wrong With Internet Filtering
Ran into my first major problem with my TEDx project today. Well, I say “major problem,” but I really mean “minor but recurring problem requiring a big change.” Anyways, the problem is that blog.com is awful. It clearly hasn’t had anybody coding on it for a couple of years at least, and even the blog…
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TEDxWOHS Parent Responses
Yesterday, as you probably already know, I introduced the TEDx project to my students.. In addition, I sent an email to their parents that included the link to the project details as well as a quick rundown of what the project entails. The parent responses have been awesome. I sent this out to about 60…
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Teacher’s Throwing Out Grades
Last weekend, I listened to Starr Sackstein (@mssackstein) talk with Nicholas Provenzano about the No Grades Movement. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about this theory, but given my new outlook on my career and life, I gave it more thought than I had before. In the past, I have always dismissed the idea.…
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TED Talk Project – A Student Experiment
As I enter my final weeks in the classroom, I find myself wanting to make a splash. Thanks to inspiration from Nicholas Provenzano (@thenerdyteacher) and his #NerdyCast, I’ve really wanted to do a project based assignment, and with my new position as DCIC, I wanted it to be tech-centric. Then, during my 1st period class today, I…
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Cool Tool for School – EdPuzzle.com
Today, I spent some time using EdPuzzle, and I wanted to share my experience with it. EdPuzzle is a website that allows you to “Make any video your lesson.” In it’s simplest form, it allows you to give it a video (either by upload or link to web video) and add stopping points. At the…
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Social Media in School
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about social media being used in school and in the classroom. There is great benefit to student use of social media, but some very clear concerns as well. Having an online presence is becoming as important for people as a credit score. We, as a society, have become so…
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Harsh Conversations With Myself
It has been an interesting year for me. For a couple of personal reasons (the details of which I don’t really want to get into here), I have written nearly nothing in a year. I haven’t found myself in a writing mood. I didn’t even win NaNoWriMo this year, and for anyone that knows me,…
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Audiobooks: Are They Really Reading?
Despite what the title may imply, this post simply will not answer that question, partly because I don’t actually have an answer and mostly because I’m too lazy to research the answer in any way. I have had friends tell me before that they have “read that book,” and then proceed to talk about the…
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10 Reasons You Should Do NaNoWriMo
As you all know, I’m a huge supporter of NaNoWriMo and The Office of Letters and Lights. They posted this on their blog today, and I love it, so I’m sharing. Here is the link to the original: http://blog.lettersandlight.org/post/32671611607/10-reasons-you-should-do-nanowrimo National Novel Writing Month is just around the bend! How around the bend? The sites are…