#edchat

So tonight, instead of working on my M.Ed. portfolio, grading, or getting my sub plans ready for Thursday, I’m twittering on #edchat.

I can’t keep up.

At least I hope I’ll be able to expand my Twitter contacts from tonight.

The only bad thing about being at a 1:1 school is that I work too much. Used to be, I’d leave school work at school. But now? It’s an all consuming hobby. Maybe this just means I have to get a *new* hobby.

Textbook committee Thursday, next week teaching curriculum projects to the last group of ELA teachers in the district, but the important thing is that I have EIGHT (8) MORE DAYS UNTIL THANKSGIVING! w00t!

I’m teaming up with the tech guy on campus to create promotional videos for the school to recruit new students. Granted, it’s a little late for it now, but at least we’ll have something for next year. We may be able to ge a few out in time for this year, but my students have a really hard time following deadlines. Take a look at my gradebook and see how many zeros I have!

I’ll be a fun, learning process. Glad to be with L. making this movie. I just have a hard time with the tech side of things sometimes – I know just enough to get myself into trouble. 🙂

For the record: I love TweetDeck – just wish I had it on campus.

Bittersweet Cacophony

After typing out a wonderful post on a strangely Lightspeed-filtered page, I hit “save draft” to make sure I wouldn’t lose what I had written.

It’s all gone.

I blame the filter. We have been having issues with it since last week. We were promised that our social networking sites would be unblocked, but they are still trying to “work out the kinks”. This means that I’m working on two computers – my school one with ExamView and other school programs and my personal laptop so that I can twitter and check my Ning.

This has really been the sore point of my day. On top of the filter, I have had IE crash on me three times while trying to use www.classtools.net making SAT vocabulary word games from Flocabulary songs. I also couldn’t upload images from my school computer, while I have not had any of these problems from my home computer. Frustrating doesn’t describe it.

On a good note, I spent the day going over the new ELA TEKS. I went in expecting the worst, but I sat next to a very friendly, outgoing, and motivated teacher. I was so worried that I’d get sat next to a crankster, but no one else sat at our table (even though the speaker repeatedly requested other grade level teachers to move to our table!), so we were able to get our task-at-hand done without any issue and had time to share ideas.

Some ideas:
1. English I and English II are now comprised of non-English speaking authors. This means (or at least it should mean) a total rewrite of traditional curriculum for these two grade levels. No more Shakespeare. No more To Kill a Mockingbird. No more Of Mice and Men. That’s going to kick some people in the teeth. I know I’ll be scrambling if I’m going to end up teaching English I this year.

Another thing that I noticed was that we had to come up with an activity that used a cluster of TEKS, rather than using one assignment per TEK. We were given a graph and were told to find a reading TEK, a writing TEK, an Oral/Written Convention TEK, a Research TEK, and a Listening and Speaking TEK. No big deal. It was actually kind of easy. However, when we shared our ideas with other tables, I noticed a huge difference between what I presented and what the other teachers presented: I didn’t follow the order of the graph. What I mean by that is that since the graph started with Reading, all of the other teachers started out their activities/projects with a reading activity. Not because of any educational reasons, but just because they were plugging values in a worksheet.

A worksheet. The bane of my student career is still haunting me. I wonder if this is something that I should share with the district teachers when I’m showing them the sample lesson plan. There is no magic formula that can be replicated for every single lesson, at least not that I’ve found. So, how can we expect engaging lessons that provoke higher order thinking skills when we have teachers who are still generating lessons from a template. It’s just seems so hypocritical. The lesson plans (and even professional development) that I am subjected to is so counter-intuitive for me. I can only imagine what the students go through in the classroom.

Tomorrow is my last day of vacation, because I’m back presenting ELAR curriculum projects to the district teachers. I had toyed with the idea of going back up to campus, but I’ve spent so much time there already – and I need to get the house ready for when I go back to work full time! Namely, my laundry.

Day Two

Well, I was going to blog about this class again like I did yesterday, but the filter has now blocked WordPress (among other pages that I use), even though we were promised that the only things that would be blocked were porn sites, gambling sites, and YouTube. I’m really disappointed. Blogging about my PD was a great way for me to internalize what I’m listening to and doing. I can disagree and develop my own ideas. It’s a way for me to talk without talking, without being loud and distracting others. Even now, S. is talking about intrinsic motivation with M., which is totally on topic, but still is pulling my attention away.

Even just writing in Word isn’t doing the same thing. I like being able to publish it immediately.  WordPress is now open after lunch, but I still can’t access “social networking” sites. Well, duh. This is how I network with other teachers.

Another site that I am battling over is www.urbandictionary.com. It is categorized as adult and I do agree that there are lots of adult words on that site. However, how am I supposed to understand what my students are talking about. A few years ago, for whatever reason, I used the phrase “chicken head” in class. I had been using it for about a week when a student (from another teacher’s class) came up to me after class one day and whispered “Miss, do you know what that means?” Obviously, I didn’t. I’ll let you look that word up Today at the table, one teacher shared her story about how her students used “neck” as a negative word. As in, “that’s so neck” followed by giggles. We still don’t know what that word means.

One last pet peeve: don’t tell me that we are going to lunch and then say “Whoah! Sorry! One last thing!” and then hold me in for a few more minutes. You’ve lost me already. How many times have you accidentally released students early and then try to get them back into the classroom? Good luck.

Well Managed Classroom

At Well Managed Classroom Training. I think that this would have been good for me ten years ago, but right now, it’s too little, too late.  So now, I have two days of service.

Two things I wanted to touch on from earlier this day:

We had to describe positive communities, and one person’s contribution for a sign of  “positive communities” was that people would vote for bonds. She didn’t say vote in bond elections, but vote FOR the bonds. I’m sorry, but I have a problem with this. I am allowed to disagree with my school district. Just because I disagree with my school district doesn’t mean that I don’t support it – in fact, I would like to think that I am making valuable contributions. I know that I part of a small minority that welcomes constructive criticism, but I think it’s needed.

Another group had to describe positive student behavior, and they listed “compliance”. I don’t know about you, loyal reader, but I bristled at that word. I have never been described as a compliant person. Does this make me a bad person? I don’t think so. I’m a fan of iconoclasts, of civil disobedience, of questions. Isn’t this a part of education? Do we want sheeple or do we want independent thinkers? This doesn’t mean that I don’t care if my students follow my instructions or not, but I want them to do so because they made the independent decision to do so rather than just out of blind obedience, out of instilled compliance.

We’re on rules and procedures right now. I’m a little lost on the pencil bag analogy the speaker is using, but he did say one interesting things – we have vague global rules, and it’s the procedures that define those rules. For example, be respectful to self and others. That’s the rule, but it’s the classroom procedures that give that rule definition.

And once again, I hear that a consequence of negative behavior is the loss of computer (and this from another 1:1 school). Loss of computer should NOT be a consequence. When the computer becomes the instructional aid, it’s NOT a privilege.  Again, I’m in the minority here. We have a culture founded on penalty.

About to break for lunch – we’ll be moving to a school-wide focus when we come back. I’m sitting with a few other random teachers, so I suspect that we’ll be together when we get back.

Things I Want to Do

1. Get Taylor Mali to come to Klein and present to the ELA teachers. Sigh. If I wasn’t already seen as a pariah in the district, this would certainly cement my status. 🙂

2. Go to more conferences. Lots and lots of conferences. I love conferences. I just wish there was more money for *teachers* to go to conferences. I have an ethical issue with non-teachers attending “teacher conferences” and then never sharing material with the teachers who actually wanted to go in the first place.

3. Put more effort into TAAE. I really enjoy being a part of this organization and I have really gotten great information from them as a whole, especially Scherry Scarborough and the Reese Education Center. If she wasn’t so far away, I’d *love* to work on her campus.

Questions to Ask Myself:
What was your high school mascot?
How much do you think you can bench press?
What was your greatest high school experience?
What education did you get?
Would you ever move to Scotland?

And the summer winds down…

I’ve been presenting the new ELAR curriculum projects to the secondary teachers in my district this week, and I have a few more sessions to go before I’m done. The first two sessions seemed to have gone over well. I’m basically going over a project-based lesson plan which can be adapted for their classroom use. Then I show them a few assignments that I have created and/or done in my classroom. I end it all with a few technology tips. Of course, I’ve promoted the Klein’s Web 2.0 class – I even saw a few people write it down, so hopefully A.R. will get some new learners soon.

I’m going to Austin tomorrow for the Texas Educator Exchange conference. I have no idea what it’s about (it’s free) because even though the agenda is up on the TEA webpage, there is no additional information. No break out sessions. No mission. Nothing. I hope it will be worth the drive and a hotel room.

I get my school laptop (new!) on Wednesday. I can’t wait. I haven’t had one all summer, and it’s really been impeding my progress. Hooray for productivity!