lunchbyteblog

My twitter stream has been filled most of the morning with the hashtag #beyondthetextbook and it has been an interesting conversation. I thought while I was thinking about it I would write a couple of short notes about the conversation. #1. I am all for losing the traditional textbook. As it stands now, most of my classes don't use the textbook very often. I don't think that US History has used their text at all this year. World History has done some work out of their book here and there. AP US has nightly reading assignments from their book but I could just as easily give them readings from somewhere else. But there are problems. Internet access is absolutely critical to losing the text. In the classes that I teach that use the computer lab, I almost never refer to the book. But in the classes without access, the students use their book more. It would either be a text of some kind or internet access. If I ran off all the things that I wanted my students to read then...

As you may or may not know by now, our district has an ipad pilot program going on and my classroom (as well as several others) is a part of this program. The district began this pilot by asking teachers to apply for a classroom set of ipads. Several teachers at our school decided to apply together and we were chosen as one of three classrooms to receive a set of ipads. Now, after a few months of using the ipads, I feel like I might have a bit of insight into the nuts and bolts of ipads in the classroom. So here are a quick few thoughts on the good, the bad, and the ugly of using ipads in a high school social studies classroom. We'll go in reverse order to end on a high note. The Ugly: Ever had one of those days where nothing goes right? If you are planning on using ipads in the classroom then prepare for several of those days early on. There will just be times where the technology doesn't work the way that you think it is going to work. We had days where only half of the...

One of my colleagues asked me about this blog a day or so ago. He wanted to know if I had moved it to another place. My response was "no, I've just been busy and haven't thought about it very much." Time flies these days. It's hard for me to fathom that three months have passed since I last updated this blog. But I promise, posts are on the way. I've much to talk about but first I have to finish reading senior papers. That should be done soon and then I'll be back. I promise. Until then, keep on rocking in the free world...

today, our APUSH students began blogging for the first time. i admit, their first blog post was a little constraining. i was asking them to answer an APUSH essay question. but i feel as if this situation was controlled enough to give them guidelines. we went over some general thoughts about blogging and then i turned them loose. so for 35 minutes they wrote about the political views of jefferson and hamilton and they tried to prove a point. then i stopped them. we moved on. but i told them that they could revise as many times as they liked. i am going to "grade" the essay on what exists when i visit their blog. so they can go back and edit it all they want. i am also giving them "points" for having a peer and an adult comment on the essay. i figure they've got to develop an audience so why not begin to build that in with their first post? i know that they won't be able to type their ap essays. i also know that they won't be able to revise over t...

"I have to be honest. After 17 years of teaching, I can't tell you how to teach. I can't even really describe what is the best way to do something." These are the words I wanted to say to our student teacher (ST) the other day. But I didn't say them. I mean, I kind of said them. But not really. And of course, we all know what good teaching looks like. We can tell who the "good" teachers are and who the "bad" teachers are can't we? We knew when we were in school. You remember then? "Man, this teacher is bad..." we thought to ourselves. District administrators think they know who is good. They have these neat reports to go on. They have TEST SCORES for crying out loud. Parents surely know. They can see reports and TEST SCORES online and in the paper. Sometimes parents even complain about their kids' teachers to other parents. Surely we all know what good teaching looks and sounds like. But ST and I were having...

Today, the staff of our school was having one of our first PLC meetings of the year. We were running through the business at hand, discussing some of the things that we have needed to get together and discuss. It was during this meeting that one of our new teachers, a lateral entry teacher, asked an innocent enough question. She asked simply, "I've got projects coming up next week and I was wondering if you guys would help me out by grading them in your classes, too?" Now let me state a couple of things about our school before I go any further. We think of ourselves as a project based school. Our students are constantly working on projects and problems of some kind. We were featured in an ASCD production based on PBLs! Secondly, we just finished a round of projects with the freshmen where all the teachers who taught freshmen spent part of their day grading freshmen projects. Thirdly, I work with an awesome bunch of people who will do anything to help kids become b...

try not to pass out from the shock. it's a blog update. of course, the passing out would require that someone was actually reading this blog at some point. i imagine you all eagerly checking lunchbyteblog every day, anxiously waiting another post. you must be forlorn by now. resigned to the fact that this blog has become something promised but never delivered upon. i follow in the footsteps of chinese democracy, duke nukem forever, and indiana jones and the crystal skull. hopefully though, this update won't suck as much as those bits of vaporware when they were finally and sadly released. what makes the long hiatus all the more confusing is that, for the longest time, i have considered myself a writer. i spent time in college studying writing. i wrote for the college paper. i have, over the years, written thousands of poems and have written quite a few in the time spent away from this blog. but i have written nary an update. that changes today. for my "return t...