After a week... [Reflection]

Today marks one week with students. Overall it's been a blast. My students are amazing. I'm reminded every day why I wanted to get back into a middle school. They have positive energy, they are voracious readers, and they seem to enjoy writing, too.

A few highlights from my first week:

• The check-out system for our classroom library is working flawlessly. Students check out books using a Google Form, then return the books to a box by my desk. When a book is returned, I note it on the spreadsheet that accompanies the Google Form, then put the book in a box by our library, where students can re-shelve it. The process is efficient, and the students are getting a kick out of using Google Forms.
• Asking "What did you learn from what we just did?" and getting both answers I was hoping for and answers that I didn't see coming.

One thing I'm looking forward to improving:

• Our Language Arts PLC is big. It's really something I'm just not used to, as opposed to a huge problem. We have a huge 6th Grade Langauge Arts team with 12 teachers spread over 8 teams (I think). We're also teaching 3 different levels of Language Arts. At this point, trying to meet all 12 of us for a half-hour on Tuesday mornings just isn't doing the trick. We haven't been able to get much done. I just need some patience, though, as we're working on breaking up into our level-groups to meet for planning time.

That's it for first-week thoughts. Yes, that's it. Cut me some slack: we're moving into our first house on Friday and my sister gets married on Saturday. I'm a bit stressed!

Old tech + new tech [Classroom]

This was originally posted on my classroom blog, but I figured the lesson idea was worth it for you guys to see:


Today we did an activity in Social Studies using a wall map and the website Scribblemaps on the LCD projector. Students discussed two locations: their favorite destination they've traveled to, and their dream destination. On the wall map, students put a blue sticky on the place they want to visit and an orange sticky where they've been. On our Scribblemap, I put a blue placemarker where students want to go and a yellow one where they've been (orange wasn't an option.)

Toward the end of the period, students shared that they learned about their classmates and also about where places are located on the map. Success!

Here is a picture of the wall map:




Here is the interactive Scribblemap. You can drag it around to see the whole world, zoom in with the + and - in the upper left, and click on the placemarkers to see the first names of the kids.

Think vs. Act [Hmm]

I'm excited to write this post for three reasons:

1. I'm happy for anything to take my mind off starting school with students tomorrow for a few minutes. That thought has been consuming me the past two weeks.
2. I get to show off the power of my Twitter-based PLN.
3. I got some great feedback for this question.

I asked the question:

I'll save my own answer for after everyone else. Remember this about Twitter: tweets come in and scroll from top to bottom, so the first response is at the bottom. It's not a big deal here, as it wasn't really a conversation; what I'm showing are independent responses to a question. Click the pictures to see them bigger.




Besides a couple responses in the "depends on the context" vein (which I'm not discounting), most of the answers to my question were "think."

Here's what I think, and I believe it closely matches what Peter Noonan (Stipling) replied with: I don't think we can have one without the other. Even when jumping out from in front of a train, I would argue you're still thinking.

We could go back and forth on the semantics of whether or not I can act without thinking or think without acting, but I think the takeaway from the question is that the two need to be consciously connected.

I'm not sure why I wondered about the initial question of think vs. act, but it may have something to do with thinking about the 6th graders who will be climbing into my classroom tomorrow. I want them to act. I want them to take on challenges, go after their dreams, and be middle schoolers. But I also want them to think.

Dead word Wordles

Note: I got a friendly email looking for more info on how to create Wordles, which made me realize I hadn't shared a link to Wordle.net. After creating these Wordles, I took a screenshot, as that is the easiest way to save your Wordle to your computer. To take a screenshot with a Mac, hit Cmd-Shift-4, then use your mouse to crop the part of the screen you want a shot of. The resulting screenshot will be saved to your desktop.

I created some Wordles of dead words and synonyms kids can use instead of the dead words. I didn't use every dead word -- as if there's some official list of overused words. Feel free to use these in any way you see fit:

Shooting hoops and taking names [Hmm]

I got up way too early Wednesday morning to play basketball at my new school. I'm not going to recap the play -- I shoot two air balls among other embarrassments to James Naismith. It's the community building this kind of activity takes on that made me want to write about it.

This summer, I had the chance to meet around fifteen of the 60+ teachers who teach in my new building. Most of them I met at either Angela Maiers's 21st Century Literacies Institute or our own Tuesday morning Impromptu PDs. I got to meet them in educational settings, both formal and informal. It was great. Also great was basketball.

I'm starting to get a reputation as the "tech guy" at my new school. That's cool. It's just a little weird since I haven't actually started teaching there yet. Technology is (obviously) one of my passions. I can embrace that, but I'm nervous about being pigeon-holed into being all about tech. I think that's why I got such a kick out of going and playing basketball with a bunch teachers the other morning.

I'm moving from a small school to one of the fastest growing schools in the state. The last thing I want to feel is alone. So for those of you who feel comfortable where you are, please invite us newbies along to whatever it is you're doing. And newbies: if someone invites you, go.

Ready or not [Reflection]

I'm sitting at Panera Bread, siphoning Wi-Fi, thinking about the school year being here. Not even around the corner anymore. My "3 months off" (that would be June 1 to August 11th) are over. It feels weird. Note: I started this post this morning while waiting for a friend from my old school. We spent the day talking about teaching and technology. It was just what I needed.

I've grown accustomed to never feeling like I'm fully prepared for school. Last year, I was hired two weeks into school. I had an office -- not a classroom -- so a month into school, while taking my first deep breath of the school year, I put up a couple posters and some borders on my bulletin boards. I didn't do any of the "get to know you" type of first-day activities. I worked with small groups all day long, as small as 1, as large as 6. We got to know each other naturally.

My classroom this year is a real classroom, not an office -- although it still doesn't have any windows, sadly. I will be breaking my classes into small groups for collaborative work, but I'll have classes of 21-26, not 1-6.

I'm going to head into my classroom tomorrow to start putting my desks in place. I'm thinking groups of four. I like pair-thinking and pairs of pairs. I'm going to try out a couple ideas for turning work in. I was really hoping we'd have Google Apps Education Edition set up in time for this school year, but I don't see that happening, which means my hopes for going paperless this year are also out the window-I-don't-have.

I've got some big ideas for this year, but I'm planning on taking the next few days to breathe in my landscape. I want to visit the classrooms of my teammates and other colleagues. I've earned some tech payback credits from colleagues I've helped set up Diigo and Google Reader this summer. I'm looking to cash in on those in the next week or so.

TAGmirror in my new classroom?

I'd like to quickly address the direction of this blog. I hope those of you who read me based on the TAG (talented and gifted) part of the title stick around while I transition into a Language Arts (and Social Studies) classroom. Let's be honest: I haven't done a superb job of being TAG-focused anyway.

The biggest change in my thinking from my year as a TAG teacher is being cognizant that I will always have students who need differentiated learning in my classroom. In other words, I will continue to think about my gifted students, and I'm actually just down the hall from our middle school's TAG teacher. She and I have been working together this summer. In other words, TAG is still on my mind. I plan on finishing my TAG endorsement this year with the hopes that someday I'll find myself back in that kind of classroom.

For the rest of you: I plan on doing a better job of reflecting on the day-to-day .... stuff related to having my first (real) classroom. That doesn't mean I'll be posting every day, but it probably means fewer tutorial-type posts and more of this kind of stuff. (Unless the tutorials are what you're here for. Let me know and I'll keep them coming.) Hopefully you stick around, too!