lunchbyteblog

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 ...