lunchbyteblog

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.