lunchbyteblog

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...