Here it is... year 3. New room, new teaching assignment, new grade level, new team... so I almost feel like calling this Year 1: The Sequel.
I've decided to changed the focus of this blog slightly. Instead of having people wade through my rants about my school district, I thought it might be more edifying to move beyond my own situation and join the discussion on technology, professional development, and shifting schools.
With some vacancies left by teachers who moved on to other districts and administrative positions, here I am in my third year as the co-chair of the Language Arts department. I've also taken a position on the school's leadership team (working on our school improvement plan.) Taking all of those things into consideration, I've taken on quite a bit this year and I feel a renewed sense of interest in helping my school develop effective and worthwhile PD. After attending the NSDC conference in Orlando this summer I brought back some ideas for our staff, and the LA department in particular, to adopt.
For the first time many teachers are being asked to track what they're doing in the classroom using actual data. We're attempting to collect data on student learning through common assessments, action research, and regular pre- and post-assessments. While this can be done in a useful way, I'm afraid many of our teachers see it as busywork and they're concerned about viewing students as numbers rather than human beings. To be honest, I'm so new at some of this that I don't know what to do to allay their fears.
Many of them have been in this district for so long, they've seen initiatives come and go, and come back again. Many of them are disillusioned and suffering from "new initiative fatigue." We bring in speakers who say the same things over and over, we're doing things that were ended ten years ago because they "weren't working..." I can understand their frustration. I suppose my goal with this blog is to engage others in conversation about motivating teachers and influencing administration to enact effective and worthwhile PD.
So... any suggestions?
13 August 2008
07 June 2008
Some thoughts on "Year Two"
Well, my second year of teaching is coming to an end. The students have graduated and all that's left is paperwork and packing. I'll be changing assignments -- yet again -- next year as I move to 7th grade Language Arts. As I get ready to spend the summer preparing for a new curriculum, new novels, etc. I thought I should make some final comments about this year.
1. I've learned that I need to e-mail messages to everyone, whether I've spoken to them in person or not. If I speak to someone in person and I have no "hardcopy" record of it, I learned this year that it could come down to my word versus theirs if they decide to accuse me of something. I won't say more than that, but I'm going to spend next year perfecting professional redundancy.
2. I'm finally learning how to manage grades, parents, behavior, etc. It's only taken two years, but I'm finally starting to get it. A little less pressure from higher up would have helped this year, since I'm still new and still learning, but that just comes with the job, I guess. Next year should be interesting, with three different preps and a new set of novels to teach. I suppose life would get boring if there was no change. Still, I'd like to do the same thing for at least 2-3 years so I can reflect on my teaching instead of always coming up with something new.
3. I'm going to SERIOUSLY tone down the amount of technology I try to use in class. This year I went a little nuts and got overwhelmed by the amount of new tech tools I was trying to use. Next year, I'll follow Thoreau's advice: "Simplify, simplify, simplify." Though I may be getting a Promethean or SMART board next year, I'm going to try and get back to basics with regard to tech in the classroom.
4. "No." I had to start toward the end of this year, but next year I will be working on my ability to say, "No." As a new teacher, I need to work on my teaching, not running a club or some other after-school activity. Again... back to basics.
5. I'm going to have more fun than I did this year. I love my job, but this year was NOT fun.
6. As much as possible, the school work is going to stay at school.
There it is... bring on Year Three.
1. I've learned that I need to e-mail messages to everyone, whether I've spoken to them in person or not. If I speak to someone in person and I have no "hardcopy" record of it, I learned this year that it could come down to my word versus theirs if they decide to accuse me of something. I won't say more than that, but I'm going to spend next year perfecting professional redundancy.
2. I'm finally learning how to manage grades, parents, behavior, etc. It's only taken two years, but I'm finally starting to get it. A little less pressure from higher up would have helped this year, since I'm still new and still learning, but that just comes with the job, I guess. Next year should be interesting, with three different preps and a new set of novels to teach. I suppose life would get boring if there was no change. Still, I'd like to do the same thing for at least 2-3 years so I can reflect on my teaching instead of always coming up with something new.
3. I'm going to SERIOUSLY tone down the amount of technology I try to use in class. This year I went a little nuts and got overwhelmed by the amount of new tech tools I was trying to use. Next year, I'll follow Thoreau's advice: "Simplify, simplify, simplify." Though I may be getting a Promethean or SMART board next year, I'm going to try and get back to basics with regard to tech in the classroom.
4. "No." I had to start toward the end of this year, but next year I will be working on my ability to say, "No." As a new teacher, I need to work on my teaching, not running a club or some other after-school activity. Again... back to basics.
5. I'm going to have more fun than I did this year. I love my job, but this year was NOT fun.
6. As much as possible, the school work is going to stay at school.
There it is... bring on Year Three.
11 April 2008
Classroom blogging
After-school meetings are usually the last thing on my mind following a long day in the classroom. This last meeting, however, left me encouraged to keep on keepin' on. Just the other day we had scheduled a "tech fair" at our school, which is probably simpler than it sounds. It was really four teachers who had attended the IL-TCE conference back in February presenting some of what they learned to the rest of the faculty. Myself and one other faculty member presented Blogs & Wikis... and received some very positive feedback.
I've been working with our district's tech department to look into school-wide blogging for next year, and the response from this tech fair told me that a good deal of teachers would be willing to try blogging and are actually excited about the idea. I think the key is to get teachers to believe that blogging will, if not revolutionize, then streamline their ability to get and give feedback from students and parents. It has certainly saved a lot of extra paper in my classroom; I carry my laptop home some nights and that's it.
With Spring Break over and the kids already talking Summer, it's been a busy and tiring two weeks. The feedback from our teachers on this presentation, though, has me reinvigorated. I'm excited about getting this set up for next year and anxious to see how each classroom teacher will take this idea of classroom blogging and make it uniquely their own.
(I think I'll go order David Warlick's book now.)
I've been working with our district's tech department to look into school-wide blogging for next year, and the response from this tech fair told me that a good deal of teachers would be willing to try blogging and are actually excited about the idea. I think the key is to get teachers to believe that blogging will, if not revolutionize, then streamline their ability to get and give feedback from students and parents. It has certainly saved a lot of extra paper in my classroom; I carry my laptop home some nights and that's it.
With Spring Break over and the kids already talking Summer, it's been a busy and tiring two weeks. The feedback from our teachers on this presentation, though, has me reinvigorated. I'm excited about getting this set up for next year and anxious to see how each classroom teacher will take this idea of classroom blogging and make it uniquely their own.
(I think I'll go order David Warlick's book now.)
02 April 2008
Just got blog-blocked...
I'm wondering how many other teachers/students out there have the problem of their district blocking web sites at the first sign of student mis-use. Last year we were able to use some YouTube videos to complement our lessons. This year they blocked it. I helped a Special Ed. teacher find a site that allowed students to "create their own superhero," which tied into a lesson she was doing in Language Arts. That site is blocked too. After attending the ICE conference in St. Charles, Illinois, in February I was introduced to Netvibes as a way of keeping track of blogs or podcasts that I might want to follow as a means of building a Personal Learning Community. This morning, I try to open my Netvibes page... I'll give you three guesses. You'll only need one.
I'm on the tech committee for our building and I'm a contributor to some of our district tech meetings, and we've even discussed the problem of blocking sites purely for the sake of keeping kids away. We came to the conclusion that instead of blocking everything, we should be educating the students on how to use the Internet appropriately. This is beginning to remind me of 2-3 weeks ago when China started blocking YouTube for the videos related to Tibet. There's great information out there, but if we just block it instead of exploring it as an educational opportunity, we're losing a great tool.
Perhaps my question should be this... are there districts that have come up with a good way of teaching their students appropriate uses of the technology? I'm finding that's not happening here, as far as I can tell from my Language Arts classroom in this little corner of the building, and instead we're opting for the quick fix.
This is a quick post, but I want to make sure to publish it before they start blocking my blog!
I'm on the tech committee for our building and I'm a contributor to some of our district tech meetings, and we've even discussed the problem of blocking sites purely for the sake of keeping kids away. We came to the conclusion that instead of blocking everything, we should be educating the students on how to use the Internet appropriately. This is beginning to remind me of 2-3 weeks ago when China started blocking YouTube for the videos related to Tibet. There's great information out there, but if we just block it instead of exploring it as an educational opportunity, we're losing a great tool.
Perhaps my question should be this... are there districts that have come up with a good way of teaching their students appropriate uses of the technology? I'm finding that's not happening here, as far as I can tell from my Language Arts classroom in this little corner of the building, and instead we're opting for the quick fix.
This is a quick post, but I want to make sure to publish it before they start blocking my blog!
13 March 2008
Adopting (and interpreting) Web 2.0
I've been listening regularly to Jeff Utecht's podcast ("On Deck": Shifting Our Schools) and I've been impressed with the caliber of the discussions that have come out of that forum. While I've always been interested in projects that connect students with others around the globe, I've never really heard any clear-cut and practical examples of how to do that. The great thing about their podcast is the international nature of the guests. There are teachers from the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. I highly recommend it to any teachers interested in adopting new technologies in your classroom.
The most intriguing thing about their recent discussions is something that should be obvious to teachers, but I'm afraid it's not for most -- what the students are learning and producing should be relevant outside of school. In fact, if students are not producing their writing or other projects to be shared with the outside world, it's next to useless. I'll turn that finger on myself, as well, and say I haven't been encouraging that concept of student-published work as much as I should. I'm encouraged by the idea that podcasting, wikis, and blogs can do this. While I feel I'm a fairly tech-savvy person, I'm new at using this Web 2.0 technology in the classroom.
I'm trying this now with introducing blogging to my 8th graders. My plan for the next couple of years is to create a school-wide blog system in which the students can use blogs to write journals for Language Arts, lab reports for Science, etc. I want to start by getting all the Language Arts teachers on board with blogging. Not only does blogging get the students' work "out there" and published for an audience, but it would also ease their teachers' workload. Not everyone might agree, but I find it much easier to post a comment to a blog as a response to something a student has written, as opposed to writing up comments on a hardcopy essay. That's not to say we should get rid of essays all together, but I think blogging could be a great way to help students establish voice in their writing and help teachers get immediate feedback to their students.
I think the big drawback, at least as most of the teachers in my building might view it, is understanding what a blog is, or a wiki... they know web sites and e-mail, but ask any one of them what moodle, twitter, or skype is and they would look at you as if you were from Mars. The first step, I think, to getting this to work is to help translate some of this for the other teachers, as well as finding one or two new applications they could really use effectively in the classroom and narrow down their options for them, to avoid overwhelming them.
The most intriguing thing about their recent discussions is something that should be obvious to teachers, but I'm afraid it's not for most -- what the students are learning and producing should be relevant outside of school. In fact, if students are not producing their writing or other projects to be shared with the outside world, it's next to useless. I'll turn that finger on myself, as well, and say I haven't been encouraging that concept of student-published work as much as I should. I'm encouraged by the idea that podcasting, wikis, and blogs can do this. While I feel I'm a fairly tech-savvy person, I'm new at using this Web 2.0 technology in the classroom.
I'm trying this now with introducing blogging to my 8th graders. My plan for the next couple of years is to create a school-wide blog system in which the students can use blogs to write journals for Language Arts, lab reports for Science, etc. I want to start by getting all the Language Arts teachers on board with blogging. Not only does blogging get the students' work "out there" and published for an audience, but it would also ease their teachers' workload. Not everyone might agree, but I find it much easier to post a comment to a blog as a response to something a student has written, as opposed to writing up comments on a hardcopy essay. That's not to say we should get rid of essays all together, but I think blogging could be a great way to help students establish voice in their writing and help teachers get immediate feedback to their students.
I think the big drawback, at least as most of the teachers in my building might view it, is understanding what a blog is, or a wiki... they know web sites and e-mail, but ask any one of them what moodle, twitter, or skype is and they would look at you as if you were from Mars. The first step, I think, to getting this to work is to help translate some of this for the other teachers, as well as finding one or two new applications they could really use effectively in the classroom and narrow down their options for them, to avoid overwhelming them.
05 March 2008
All ideas and no assistance...
I've had some great ideas lately for projects involving the use of technology -- most notably Web 2.0 technology -- that I think would really engage the kids with the material. Multiple problems arise when I try to plan out these projects and implement them.
Problem #1: I've never worked with some of these tools before...
The Web 2.0 tools that are available are just mind-boggling. (Or should that be mind-blogging?) Blogs, Wikis, social networks, etc... the possibilities seem endless, and I think that's where I'm running into a few problems. The possibilities do seem endless, and that's probably making it more difficult for me to narrow down my focus and intent. There are so many things the kids can do with these different tools, it's difficult to pick just one or two components and use those effectively. So many of the teachers in my building are either anti-technology or simply afraid to try using it, that there is very little building-level support for coming up with tech-related lessons and projects.
Problem #2: This takes a lot of setup and instruction before the kids even know how to use a Web 2.0 effectively...
At one of our last district meetings on implementing technology and 21st century literacies in the classroom, part of the discussion focused on teachers' fears that they couldn't use technology because the kids were already "masters" of the Internet. As "digital natives" they already knew so much more about the digital world than we (the immigrants) did. I don't think this is true at all. The kids know of the digital world, but I don't believe for a second that they are masters of it. I used that assumption that they were masters at the beginning of the year, but many of them, even at the 8th grade level, don't know how to post something on a blog unless it's MySpace. I can't even remember how many times I told them to e-mail their essay to themselves so they could work on it at home and the response back was, "How do I do that?"
It takes a lot of setup and pre-instruction to get the students ready to use Web 2.0 tools, and my problem with that is the lack of tech support at the building level here. So far, this year, we've had two different tech coordinators for our building, with long periods of no tech coordinator in-between. We currently have no tech coordinator for our building. Even the ones we do get are not necessarily teachers, so when I go to conferences and hear about the LA teacher working with their building's tech coordinator to prepare students for a Wiki project, that doesn't seem like a reality here (at least not yet.) The district-level tech facilitators have been great, but they can't come to your building every day to help out with something. It is nice to see people getting excited about some of the ideas I have for integrating Web 2.0 tools into the Language Arts curriculum. Most other teachers are so freaked out by words like "blog" or "moodle" that they don't want to have anything to do with them. That's completely understandable... when I didn't know what they were, they confused me too.
Problem #3: I'm still new and this and I'm overwhelmed...
I know this is coming off as being a long and rambling complaint with a list of excuses... a new baby at home, increased responsibilities and a leadership role at school, family health problems... I don't want to make excuses, but with all that's going on in personal-life and professional-life, I don't have time to run a one-man show with regard to coming up with lessons and projects that use 21st century tools.
If anyone has any solutions or suggestions, I am all ears (or eyes, as this is a blog and not a podcast!)
Problem #1: I've never worked with some of these tools before...
The Web 2.0 tools that are available are just mind-boggling. (Or should that be mind-blogging?) Blogs, Wikis, social networks, etc... the possibilities seem endless, and I think that's where I'm running into a few problems. The possibilities do seem endless, and that's probably making it more difficult for me to narrow down my focus and intent. There are so many things the kids can do with these different tools, it's difficult to pick just one or two components and use those effectively. So many of the teachers in my building are either anti-technology or simply afraid to try using it, that there is very little building-level support for coming up with tech-related lessons and projects.
Problem #2: This takes a lot of setup and instruction before the kids even know how to use a Web 2.0 effectively...
At one of our last district meetings on implementing technology and 21st century literacies in the classroom, part of the discussion focused on teachers' fears that they couldn't use technology because the kids were already "masters" of the Internet. As "digital natives" they already knew so much more about the digital world than we (the immigrants) did. I don't think this is true at all. The kids know of the digital world, but I don't believe for a second that they are masters of it. I used that assumption that they were masters at the beginning of the year, but many of them, even at the 8th grade level, don't know how to post something on a blog unless it's MySpace. I can't even remember how many times I told them to e-mail their essay to themselves so they could work on it at home and the response back was, "How do I do that?"
It takes a lot of setup and pre-instruction to get the students ready to use Web 2.0 tools, and my problem with that is the lack of tech support at the building level here. So far, this year, we've had two different tech coordinators for our building, with long periods of no tech coordinator in-between. We currently have no tech coordinator for our building. Even the ones we do get are not necessarily teachers, so when I go to conferences and hear about the LA teacher working with their building's tech coordinator to prepare students for a Wiki project, that doesn't seem like a reality here (at least not yet.) The district-level tech facilitators have been great, but they can't come to your building every day to help out with something. It is nice to see people getting excited about some of the ideas I have for integrating Web 2.0 tools into the Language Arts curriculum. Most other teachers are so freaked out by words like "blog" or "moodle" that they don't want to have anything to do with them. That's completely understandable... when I didn't know what they were, they confused me too.
Problem #3: I'm still new and this and I'm overwhelmed...
I know this is coming off as being a long and rambling complaint with a list of excuses... a new baby at home, increased responsibilities and a leadership role at school, family health problems... I don't want to make excuses, but with all that's going on in personal-life and professional-life, I don't have time to run a one-man show with regard to coming up with lessons and projects that use 21st century tools.
If anyone has any solutions or suggestions, I am all ears (or eyes, as this is a blog and not a podcast!)
29 February 2008
I'm a bad blogger
I seem to lose track of time, get overwhelmed by work, and so on and so forth... and the blog gets neglected. To go from September to March without a post is pretty sad. After the Illinois Computing Educators conference yesterday, I'm inspired to try and keep up with posting. We'll see how it goes. This next week is ISAT testing, so I will have a little time on my hands.
One thing I'll take some time to gripe about... or more appropriately, seek guidance on... is dealing with students who chronically turn work in late. Classroom discipline is not a problem, expectations are clear, etc., but the majority of my students this year have yet to turn an assignment in on time. Any thoughts on this?
One thing I'll take some time to gripe about... or more appropriately, seek guidance on... is dealing with students who chronically turn work in late. Classroom discipline is not a problem, expectations are clear, etc., but the majority of my students this year have yet to turn an assignment in on time. Any thoughts on this?
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