This week during our Wednesday morning professional development time we were focusing on getting teachers to create differentiated plans to meet the needs of ELL students. Part of this plan involved having teachers working in the PLCs to plan their lesson while focusing on the english proficiency levels of their students and determining what scaffolds…
This weekend I will be heading down to Kansas City to attend Edcamp KC on Saturday. I am spending 3.5 hours on the road Friday so I can spend a large chunk of my Saturday with other teachers, learning together and not getting paid for this. Many would be asking why I would be doing…
One of the issues that has really become evident to me lately is that we have a lot of people, teachers included, who are posting onto blogs in a way that is not modeling what we would expect from students. We have educators posting rants and overreactions about topics where they may be misinformed or…
With all of the negativity in the news this week for schools across the country, I am reminded more and more of what I have heard so many great digital leaders state; that we need to be our own PR department. There have been a lot of negative stories concerning schools and teachers that the…
I am a firm believer that video is a powerful tool in the classroom, both for the students and for the teacher. I am not talking about just watching a video for 45 minutes and hoping that the students took something away but video in the sense of how many are not using it. We…
(Thanks to @sandirankin for taking this picture of me presenting) Finally had some time to reflect and recover a bit mentally from ITEC and I am certain that it was a great success for me. I thought both of my presentations went well and I had some great conversations with others that will help me…
Tomorrow I will be at the fall conference for ITEC and I will be prepared thanks to being through this all before. I think there are some things you can easily do to be prepared when attending a conference because the learning can happen in many different ways. The following are ways that I am…
After attending the ICTE conference yesterday (Iowa Council of Teachers of English) in Johnston and teaching some physics yesterday and today, I am very much ready for the ITEC conference on Monday. I am a big proponent of going to education conferences as long as you focus on how you can improve as an educator…
Kaizena was updated lasted night and is now accessible as an Add-on through Google Docs. For those that are new to Kaizena, it is a way to leave voice and text comments in a Google Doc as well as include resources and tags related to the learning. Leaving effective feedback should be a goal of…
Throughout my teaching career I have been put into certain situations where I did not have the tools or resources necessary to do what I wanted, or so it would seem. I have found ways over the years to take what I have and turn that into what I want, as best as I could.…
Donovanscience 