lunchbyteblog

well- i said that i was going to talk about some of the changes that are happening at our school and i guess one of the biggest ones is that we are going to have a new principal. we aren't really happy about the whole state of affairs but it's the way things have fallen. we are trying to make the best of it and are in the middle of a principal search right now. let me tell you the story of how this came about. back in the summer, the state of nc (in all the infinite wisdom of government bureacracy) decided to end the practice of what has been deemed 'double dipping.' this practice describes hwo the state was letting retirees from schools come back and teach and earn both their retirement and a salary. the process came about because there was a teacher shortage in nc a few years back and the legislature figured that this would allow them to work their way around the shortage. many, many, people took advantage of the 'loophole' and continued to work in a job...

ok- lots of things have happened here at our school while i was not blogging and i thought that maybe i could get back at this blogging thing a little more. i have lots of things to talk about but i should probably start with the events that are going on today and then work my way backwards. several posts about all the craziness happening around here are to follow but let's focus on today for now. today my school is being visited by a team of people from other schools for our school wide peer observation. this is something that we do at least once a year and it is part of how we gauge how we are doing with regards to many of the things that we have stressed as part of our school improvement plan. it is based on the idea of rounds that doctors do. if you want to know how you are doing, you can't be afraid to ask others to come and look at you. that's what this is all about. so today, there will be 14 or 15 people from other schools wandering around our rooms and our la...

Some days it all just seems rather funny to me. The school that I teach at has been in existence now for going on five years but no one seems to know that we are around. Just today, I was finishing up 5th period lab time (which we have in our great hall/cafe)with the students when the room began filling up with Child Nutrition staff from across our county. As the students were leaving and I was cleaning up, one of the ladies motioned me over and asked me, "Is there a school here?" I told them "yes" and proceeded to tell the assembled ladies about our program. After I was finished they all said what a great idea we had and how neat our school was. I agreed. I do think that we have a great school and other people "in the know" must think so also. We received the Innovator award from the New Schools Project of NC this summer. That means we were recognized out of all the New Schools Project schools in NC as the people exemplifying what the New Schools ...

well, school has been back for a week now and it is time for some first week reflections. so in no particular order, here we go... #1. our classroom doors now have locks. wow. a nice concept. we went all of last year with no locks on our doors. only a few things were stolen. this year might be even better. maybe nothing will be stolen and maybe we won't have to even use the locks. #2. not content with just one classroom, i have now taken over another classroom and our cafeteria! the rest of the school and the surrounding city block are next. #3. our garden is producing too much okra. #4. it will take me at least a year to get used to the fact that one of my female colleagues got married. it's not that i don't believe her, it's just that i may never remember to call her by her new last name. #5. hey, we still have jobs! all snarkiness aside, it has been a great start to a new year at the school. things are running more smoothly than ever and we have anot...

my first day back at school. the end of the endless summer. the workdays before the kids arrive. hmmm... i really do love teaching. it is a part of me. i think back to a lot of the other decisions that i made when i was 17 and i shudder. but the decision to become a teacher worked out pretty well. here i am- a scant 22 years later. walking in to another year of school. and while i'm sorry to see summer go because i enjoy it so much, i like the beginning of school. not so much the work days, because i never seem to get a lot of work done. but i like school because of the kids. i like to challenge them and i want them to challenge me. i live for the moments when the light bulb comes on for them. i like to joke with them and i like to push them to think. i want them to examine their world and i want them to find out something about it and themselves. i want them to learn. and that's why i do it. that's why many teachers do it. i could complain about the salar...

I'm sitting here at my table in the ap world history training and we are looking at the dbq (the document based question) that is a part of the ap world history test. As we talk about it, I am struck with just how important it is that we, as teachers, teach thinking skills. Now that may seem like a no-brainer, but really thinking skills are often lost in the greater quest of content. We spend so much time worrying about content that we often don't take the time to teach kids how to think. We do this because of high stakes end of course testing. The majority of tests that our kids take are based on their ability to answer content specific multiple choice questions. So teachers worry and fret about getting content across to kids. This emphasis on content can be counter productive though. Kids may be able to regurgitate facts and figures for these tests but the current state of end of course tests doesn't really push students to develop thinking skills and that's s...

i'm sure that one of these days i will come up with a coherent thought about our experiences at ap camp. between now and then you can continue to read crosson's blog about the experience. it is here: crossonedu.wordpress.com i will tell you guys that we went to jamestown today and it was pretty cool. pics and funny video to follow at some point. i promise we are learning quite a bit. i just find it difficult to put it together when i am in the middle of it.

so, i'm here in williamsburg, va being trained in ap world history. there are two of us from my school here. myself and our english teacher. he is getting training in english literature. i was going to post a lot about what we are doing but i decided to let him tell you about what was happening. he has a new blog and he typed out today's entry on his itouch. it took him a while. small keyboard and such. go here to check it out: crossonedu.wordpress.com i'll post some more of our exploits tomorrow and i'll let you all know how things are going. until then, you are going to have to get the goods from him. short and sweet but i'll be blogging more as we go.

as we wind down this school year, amid the testing and the retesting, our thoughts turn to next year. one of my coworkers, an awesome teacher, has begun to think about the idea of a paperless classroom. now before you get started, he isn't getting rid of the books. he teaches english and he wants the kids to hold books in their hands. he wants them to read. he just doesn't want to waste paper on handouts, quizzes, tests, worksheets, etc... so he asked me to try and brainstorm some ideas for him and for me to pass along any ideas that i might hear. i told him that i think it is a great idea and we have begun to discuss the ways he could pull this off. he teaches in one of our computer labs so there are all sorts of web tools he could use to make his classroom mostly paperless. we have talked about wikis, skype , twitter , sasinschools , polleverywhere , and lots of other sites that we already use. our school webpages have the ability to post quizzes but i think he is goi...

it's about this time every year that i begin to get bored with the things that i have been doing all year long and i begin to think about ways to tear apart the classroom experience. it isn't that i haven't been trying new things and new innovations all year, i have. it's just that i have tried them and used them and now i want to try something completely new. the problem is that everything still seems too teacher centered. i really want my students to be responsible for their own learning. but what does that look like in a class of fifteen year olds? how do i tell them what they need to know without telling them what they need to know? i could come up with multiple approaches for each lesson and i could turn them loose. or i could ask them what they want to learn and we could learn some things together. maybe i could have them teach me something new about the world. i just don't know. the point here is that i know that things need to change and i know tha...

as my world history students are working on answering questions about the marshall plan, I have some nice and relaxing tunes playing in the background. I set up a pandora account a while back and i have managed to spend enough time tweaking my stations that i now have several stations that i can play in the classroom while my students are working. I have found that there seems to be less off task talking when there is music playing. I already let my students listen to their mp3 players when they are working on answering questions. Sometimes i play them some of my music, sometimes i let pandora play. The station that we are listening to today is a calexico station that i enjoy because it plays mostly instrumental. This keeps the kids from singing along but it gives them something to listen to in the background. i know that i have blogged about music in the classroom before, but today it just seemed like the music was setting the mood. and that's all right.

today is the day that i take my national board assessment. i'm getting ready to head out of here and make my way to charlotte for the day. four hours of testing in front of me. after this, it will all be over except for the long wait until november when i find out if i passed or not. if i didn't, i'll get to do it over again. anyway, it has been quite a while since i have blogged and i just thought that i would check in. i haven't really decided the direction i want to go in with this blog. if i decide to keep doing it, i want to do a redesign. i want it to be a little more dynamic. a little more engaging. anyway, just thought i would stop by blog land and say hello. time to go get some breakfast. anyone know any good brain food?

i decided to take the day off today to work on my national boards. i have been slowly writing and trying to put some things together but now is the time to really get to work on it. the portfolio has to be postmarked by march 31st. i have been working on entry 4 and entry 1 today. for my area of certification, high school social studies (or as it is known in national board speak- adolescent and young adult social studies-history), these two entries are about professional accomplishments and writing to learn in the classroom. professional accomplishments entails all the things that i do and have done to improve student learning in my classroom. am i learner, am i a leader, do i share and teach with my peers, etc? the answer to all of these should be, of course, YES. i think a lot of teachers do these kinds of things. national boards just makes you reflect on it and makes you think about the how and why parts of it. the writing part is a little trickier. i am supposed ...

it turns out that raising money in the digital age is not so different than raising money in the not so digital age. several months ago i submitted a project to donorschoose.org . since then, my school has received a whopping $20 in donations. of that, i gave $10 just to get the ball rolling. i know, i know, times are tough. and the donorschoose site doesn't exactly make the donate button jump out at you. but it is especially frustrating given that the gates foundation is currently matching money donated to any project. i basically need 50 people to give $10 dollars to fund our project. we would like to buy some more digital video cameras so that our students can have better access to them and use them in their projects. this was a need designated and brought up by the students in one of our school senate sessions. you don't often hear students say that we need more books, but video cameras, now that's a different story. so, if we don't get the money through d...

one of the things that is special about our school is our common planning time. now, i know what you're thinking, you're thinking that common planning time happens in lots of schools. the big high school that i taught at last year also had common planning time. all of the social studies teachers had planning time together. all of the math teachers had planning time together etc... you get it. but here's the kicker- at nchshs all the teachers have planning time together. all of us. in one room. at the same time. talk about common planning. this works surprisingly well. we have all of our desks set up in a room that we call the "bullpen." we all sit in here together and plan at the same time, after lunch. we are able to do this because students are in p.e. or project time or an art class of some form. these classes aren't taught by our regular teachers. that way, all of us can be in CPT together. we solve all kinds of problems in common planning ti...

in the same vein as yesterday's post, i'm still working on ways to spice it up a little more in my classroom. so now i'm wondering about skype. i have played around with skype and have used it a few times to communicate with people but i'm wondering now about its use in the classroom. i know that a lot of teachers use it in the classroom but where are we supposed to find people to skype into our classes? i have seen some lists of people who are willing to skype with a class but i prefer to set it up with people i know. unfortunately, i can't think of anyone i know that would be a useful and willing participant right now. i'm sure that i will eventually get together a group of people who are willing to skype with my classroom but as of now, i see it as this great possibility. so who do i know that might be willing? lots of people. how many of them could be useful in a world history or us history class? i don't know. i've got to think on it a lit...

i have recently been working on updating some of my powerpoint presentations for my us history classes. i haven't actually read presentation zen yet by garr reynolds but i have heard enough of the buzz and seen enough of the handouts to know that there is something of merit there. this has caused me to go back and look at my presentations and to begin the process of reworking them. i don't think that my slides were horrible to begin with, but i have begun to use my slides as more of an aid. an aid that helps to tell the story, but doesn't tell the whole story. i had/have a fair amount of words on the slides but i was cognizant in the beginning of overwhelming my audience with too many words. best to keep it simple and let me tell the story than have them looking and trying to read too much while i am speaking. anyway, i am adding more video, more pictures, and more questions. i am also attempting to make the presentations more interactive. so how do i do that? i do...

some students who are part of our "pub club" (publications...)here at school just interviewed me for an upcoming issue of our school newsletter. they did a good job and they had some interesting questions. one of the questions they asked was "what is one of the strangest things that has ever happened to you in a classroom?" that's a good question. having been teaching now for a decade and a half, i've had a few weird things happen to me. but i'll tell you the story that i told them. one time i had a deer try and get into my classroom. i think he heard there was some real learning going on and he wanted to see what is was all about. ok, i made the second part up, but not the first. one afternoon some students and i were having quizbowl practice when i heard something smack hard against my outside window. it sounded like a big bird had just flown into it. i looked over and saw a blood smear on the window and assumed that it was, in fact, a bird. ...

according to usa today and other news outlets, education's part of the stimulus bill racks up @ 142 $ billion dollars. that is, according to some, the most money education has ever received from the federal government. i think it is about time. anyone who spends any time in the education world knows that american teachers and schools have been trying to get by on shoe string budgets and bake sales for far too long. i read somewhere (i think in tom freidman's book, the world is flat )that ibm's research and development budget was bigger than the federal government's budget for education. one company. education has been getting the shaft for a long time because schools are normally funded by local taxes which are controlled by local county commissioners or school boards or state officials. these politicians rightly worry about being reelected if they raise taxes. therefore, schools often function on shoe strings. the school that i taught at last year could not ha...

a crowded school day = little time to get some blogging done. trying to work on school website, teaching class, grading papers, dealing with tech issues, working on national boards, reading email and twitter, wondering if i'll be able to clean my desk off in the next few minutes. just another typical day.

today we have visitors @ our school from other places and they are part of a peer review process that is going on. we have invited administrators and teachers from other schools in and have asked them to look at our school with the eyes of outsiders. we want to know how we appear to other people and we want specific input on two of the goals from the school improvement plan. some of the people today are looking at a teacher who is doing a lesson that involves the group rubric that we developed through a grant from the gates foundation this summer. a few of us gathered back in august to come up with a group project rubric that could be used across the curriculum in our school. the visitors are watching one of our teachers use this rubric in class and are giving feedback on its use. secondly, they are looking at our use of data when it comes to individual students. we are in the process of coming up with ways to track individual student progress. in my class, this has ended up bei...

ok, so i know i have been slack in the posting department as of the last few days but it is because we haven't been in school. we had the martin luther king holiday off on monday and then tuesday and wednesday we were off because of the semester change. so today, we are back. in full force. ready to kick some butt. we have spent the last two days grading and planning and trying to gauge where we are with regard to our school improvement plan. in other words, busy, very busy. now the students are back with us and all the gnashing of teeth (jw speak) and complaints and soul searching between the teachers have taken a back seat to the needs of the kids. this is one of the neat things about this school. i work with a staff that is full of hardworking, caring people. we look at our ourselves, self assess, judge where we are and how we are going to get where we want to go. there is a lot of self-doubt and passion and general craziness as we strive to be better teachers in a bet...

it's an extra large friday because we have a long weekend. the holiday and then two work days to try and get some things done. i've been working on updating the school website and i've been grading papers and i've been twittering and skype chatting and now i'm blogging. am i a web 2.0 teacher or what? our students are working on reflection papers. they are reflecting on how they have changed so far this year based on a semester at our school. one of the questions that they have to answer for this reflection asks "what talents or skills have you discovered that you have?" one of my students wrote that she has discovered that she can take beautiful pictures. that's a nice thing to discover at school. i think this is important. as schools evolve and change with the times, students are discovering more things. not only about themselves but they are discovering some of the ideas and learning that we need them to know. they are discovering new skil...

so somedays are weirder than others. today has been one of those days. my day began this morning bright and early about 7:10 at school when one of our students walked in with a word issue. it seems she had been working at home on a project, saved it, and then brought it to school to print out. however, when she went to print it out here all of her words had changed to weird alien symbols. i thought "no problem, she has just switched the font accidentally to symbols." not so easy. i go to switch the font, and it changes everything to blank boxes. what in the world is going on here? i stare at it for another few minutes and decide i have no idea. moving forward into the day. we began our youth truth surveys today. nothing really weird about the surveys today. it came off without a hitch. one thing that i thought was funny though was the fact when the students finished the survey they had the option of adding youthtruthsurvey as a friend on myspace or facebook. tha...

i read and hear a lot about social networking these days. you know, all the cool kids are doing it. the kids have myspaces, and facebooks, and nings and maybe even a few of them twitter and skype. but the majority of teachers out there don't do any of these things. i understand the reluctance of teachers to get involved. there is so much of a demand on the time of teachers already. but i wonder how much of it is also just a flat-out refusal to learn something new on the part of some people. you would think that teachers would be the first in line when there is learning to be done. unfortunately this is not always the case. i also wonder where the line should be drawn between students and teachers. many teachers have no problems letting students into their on-line world. i personally, do not add students as friends on facebook or whatever until they are no longer students. a class ning of course would be excepted from this but i can't have a class ning because we block ...

when i was a surly teenager, back in the mid eighties, my parents used to bust into my room and yell at me to "turn that music down." i would sit in my yellow bean bag, which sat on my yellow and orange shag carpet, and listen to loud rock and roll while i was doing my homework. they would say "you can't possibly be able to think while that music is roaring in your ears." but i could. at least, i could do most of the kinds of work that my teachers were assigning to me. look this up in the book, fill out this worksheet, yada, yada. now fast forward some twenty odd years later (and they were odd), and i am a teacher and i sometimes play music in the background of my class while students are working on things independently. i also allow them to listen to their own mp3 players or ipods while they are doing independent work at their seat. it doesn't bother me. my rules are that that i shouldn't be able to hear it and when i or someone else is talking t...

i am currently in the middle of working on my national board certification. it is a good thing and it is always helpful to spend some time reflecting on our practices as teachers. what works, what doesn't and why? everyone who has tried to become a board certified teacher has their own stories of what was happening in their lives while they were going through the national board process. it's not something that is overly hard, just time consuming. having recently gotten my master's degree, i can tell you, for me so far the master's degree was harder. but i am starting to feel the crunch of time. new school. new classes. new paradigm. = little time. (did i mention i thought this would be a good time to start a blog?) breathe, exhale, the sun is shining, smile.

one of my colleagues just received a fedex box with our youth truth survey materials in it. the good people at the gates foundation have picked us (ok, maybe we volunteered) to do a survey of all of our students. one of the things that we are trying to do is to use data to inform many of our decisions. this is another form of data that we are going to be able to use. we are constantly trying to figure out how we are doing and how we are going to improve. this is a question that businesses ask themselves all the time. but how often does it happen in schools? i've always thought that if you want to know how teachers are doing, you should ask the kids. the kids see us everyday. instead, we rely on adminstrators to tell us how we are doing. principals, superintendents, people like that. people who aren't in our classrooms very often. maybe we'll find out some good information...

just as an aside, i thought that i would say thank you to some people who may never read this blog. some parents bought us lunch today. it was good and from olive garden. obviously we are a small school and it doesn't take a lot to feed us but this kind of stuff really does make your day.

well- if i'm going to blog, i figure that i should let my readers know who, what, when and where. in other words, who are we and why am i blogging? i am a high school social studies teacher that enjoys using technology in the classroom. i teach @ a new schools project school in nc. the link is above-click on the title of this post. we are trying to redesign the high school by using innovative teaching methods, technology, collaborative planning, and data driven instruction. basically, we are trying "to build an airplane while we are flying it." How are we doing? We think we are doing ok so far...

so i have been trying to figure out where to put my educational musings. i mean, i have a bunch of blogs that i use for different things, but none really for my thoughts on education and where we are heading. so, i said to myself, "self- you really need to begin to have this conversation about education and schools and such OUT THERE. you know, out of your head where others can see it and comment on it." and here we are. i've had this blog that i used to do tech training on @ my last school and this thing has been languishing around useless in the ether-verse for a long time. all the archived links before this one will just take you to a trial run of my students and myself playing with a blog and their cell phones. unless you are really bored, i'd ignore the previous posts. i was going to delete them all but then thought differently. in any regard, i have decided to begin to use it again. the purpose will be for me to write down random thoughts on education and ...