Special shout out to Donors Choose for their goal, to not only supply funds for classroom materials but, to also help bring professional development to teachers! It was such a blessing not only to me, but other friends and coworkers who got professional development opportunities in the areas such as speech, technology, reading and writing. In case you didn’t know about Donors Choose, you should check them out. DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help students in need. Public school teachers from every corner of America post classroom project requests on the Donors Choose site.
This has been a busy week getting things in order to go to the ISTE- International Society for Technology in Education this June in Philadelphia. We were nominated as a team for an award, although we won't know until early June if we will receive it, we still wanted to attend this conference. If you are going let us know!
Our
entire district participated in a book study Grading Smarter Not Harder
by Myron Dueck. As the culminating
activity for the book study we Skyped with him, in our big auditorium, at our
Professional Development meeting on Wednesday.
We were able to listen to his point of view on specific topics and we
got to ask questions. We then met with
mixed groups from our elementary on up to high school to discuss the chapters
in the book. My big take away from the
book is to make sure our assessments match up with our learning targets. He inspired my grade level to build a unit
based in principle of the way he outlines unit planning in his book.
Calling all guest bloggers! That’s what this week has been busy with! BLOGGING! BLOGGING!! BLOGGING!!! Wow!! Who knew getting a blog/website up and running would be so much fun! Yet also so tiring? This has been a great new adventure for us in the world of technology. We feel so blessed that things are falling right into place. We are loving Google Blogger! It has been working so nicely… with the help of a hubby that is a computer program! (Had to share some love there...let’s see if he reads this!) If you are a blogger and would like to connect with us, please take a moment to contact us and tell us about a guest blog idea you would like to post on our site. We can’t wait to hear from you!!!! 
One more thing...we did this editing activity and I loved it so I wanted to share this too...I got the idea from another teacher - go figure! She called it "Slide the Line" you partner students up and have them face each other. I asked students to read their writing to their partner. Their partner's job was to tell two things they liked about the writing and two things that could make it even better. Then the other person read their writing. I gave them time to share then jingled the chimes and one line slid down one person. Then they had a new partner and repeated the activity. They loved it and got lots of feedback on their writing. When I do it next time I will have them spread out a bit more because they were pretty close to each other...might make it easier for partnerships to hear. Fun to try new things!!
We learned about this online engineering program today from our high school. They use CAD...this program is called Tinkercad for younger students. I have a student who figured it out very quickly. He is making 3D design plans for a toy
train. We are then going to send it over to the high school where they can print it out on the 3D printer! Just amazing!
