lunchbyteblog

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."- Ferris Bueller I was thinking about that great philosopher Ferris Bueller earlier today. I was reflecting on a conversation that I had this past Friday with our school superintendent, associate superintendent, personnel director, and IT administrator. Our school principal was kind enough to join me and support me. The topic of the conversation was the school district's recent decision to block facebook and twitter on all school employee computers. I had requested the meeting and the assembled district staff had been gracious enough to hear me out. I will spare you all the details of the meeting except to say that I have the utmost respect for everyone there and that our discussion was wide ranging, free flowing, and ultimately concerned with what was best for teachers and students. Every time I talk to the people at the district office I am impressed with how much they

Well, the Thanksgiving holiday break comes to a close today so I'm going to spend the rest of the day working on grading papers. I have to say that teaching never feels like a "job" except when I have to go through the drudgery of "grading." It just seems as if we should have come up with better forms of assessment by now. The one size fits all worksheet, quiz, multiple choice exam, just doesn't feel authentic to me and it never has. Besides, once all the grades are in that's when the real massaging of the numbers begins- classroom participation, extra credit, etc... Technology should really be answering this question for us. The days of bubble sheets are hopefully numbered. I want to see technology leveraged in a way that frees teachers from the "marking blues" and gets rid of the "red pen syndrome." Data should be driving our decisions when it comes to curriculum design and lesson ideas. I want a data tracking system that sh

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our school recently purchased several Ipads. Right now I am sitting in a comfortable chair in my home study and I am typing out this post on the onscreen keyboard of the iPad. The keyboard is fairly intuitive as it tries to guess what I really mean and autocorrect my mistakes but it is going to take some time for me to get used to typing things in this manner. I guess that's really true of a lot of new technology though and it has never stopped me before. There is always a learning curve and some things may seem very weird the first few times that we try them. Eventually though, we begin to master the new ways of doing things and it becomes easy and we wonder what the big deal was in the beginning. As teachers, I think it is very important that we try new things and that we remember what it feels like to be a novice. We have to be able to go out on a limb if we expect students to be able to do so. It's funny that we often want our stud

today many people across the globe who are interested in educational reforms are writing about it as part of the #blog4reform day. i figured i would jettison my 2 cents worth out into the blogosphere and see if i could start some conversation of my own. before we begin to talk about reform though, we need to ask ourselves "what is the purpose of education?" i think we would have many different opinions and answers to that question. is the purpose of education to prepare students for jobs? to be good citizens? so that they will be informed? there are as many answers to the question as there are ways to reform education. we need to start with that. when we talk about reforming education, are we really talking about reforming schools? because "education" is in the process of a makeover already. i can learn about anything with access to a computer. want to know how to build a treehouse? there are videos and plans online. need to learn a foreign language? t

on monday of this week, our school received three ipads that we had ordered. since then, we have been investigating the use of ipads in school. i have received many helpful hints and ideas for apps that were "must have" from my PLN. granted we are only in day 3 really of the testing but i have a few early observations. #1. what good is an ipad as an instructional device if i can't show the app through a projector to all my students? i mean, there are some really cool apps out there but it doesn't make one bit of sense if i can display those apps to a crowd. gathering 24 students around the ipad just doesn't work. come on. there has to be an easy way to mirror the ipad display. #2. tweetdeck on the ipad is about as cool as it gets. can't say enough about this app. it just works the way all things should work on an apple product. apple spends a large amount of time thinking about design and making things intuitive on their own software. tweetdeck ha

read a great article by dean shareski this morning at huffington post and it made me think about getting back to blogging.  you can read the article here .  dean makes some great points and it made me decide to get off my butt and try some more blogging.  i guess i had just gotten to the point that the blog felt like more work that i had to do.  i was never really into it because i don't think i really had an idea of what i wanted to say and what i wanted to talk about.  but now i'm going to try it again. i think most of the problems with the blog were in my head.  i kept thinking that blog posts had to be long and that each of them should have some well defined reason to exist.  and maybe they do for some people and maybe that will happen eventually here.  but it isn't going to happen today.   the reality of it all is that maybe i just need a place to write about school-type things.  maybe i don't need that writer's filter all the time.  maybe sometimes i just have

yesterday we had our district technology meeting.  usually these meetings are a little frustrating for me because we are often TOLD what the district is doing with the monies that have been earmarked for technology.  at my last teaching gig, the individual technology committees at the schools made those decisions.  i still think that it makes sense for the schools themselves to have a pot of money and to make their own decisions about the technology purchases that they make.  but that’s a different story and a different post. yesterday, after listening to how those monies would be spent this year, something different happened.  yesterday the principal of the school in which i teach was able to present to the group an idea that we have been working on here at the school for a while.  yesterday we brought up the idea of opening up the school wi-fi to the personal computers of students and teachers.  the committee as a whole had a good conversation about the pros and cons o

well, school starts back tomorrow with a string of teacher workdays before the kids come back on august 25th.  this summer, like all the previous summers, has sped by and tomorrow i will begin my 16th year in the teaching profession.  the start of school is always an exciting time.  there will be much to do- meetings to attend, getting the classroom ready, solving scheduling problems, working on the school improvement plan, talking with other teachers about the upcoming year, the list goes on. i am dead-set on blogging more this year.  there are always lots of things to talk about and to share.  i am going to try to not be overwhelmed by the idea of writing more and would love some reader input from time to time. so as we ramp up the year, i'll be doing my best to try and put some thoughts and ideas down here.  i'm sure there will be plenty to write about.  it is school, after all.

test

well, it has obviously been a while since i have posted here. thought i might get back at it. lots of things have happened since my last blog. i have lots to cover but first, let me get at what has been happening the last few days. last week we had a group from ASCD here at our school. this group was here to film our school and our students as an example of a school trying to emphasize problem based learning. here at the newton school, our students are required to complete health-science projects. the group from ASCD wanted to film the process that our students go through when working on these problems. an example of a health-science project (so called because we are a health-science high school): Water and how it is essential to life. from here, students can relate it to climate change, disease, food production, water pollution, etc... the students get to work within the topic and relate the topic to things that they might find interesting. they have to have a driving questi