J is often in trouble. He is often reprimanded. He stands on chairs. He can be mean to the other students. He fights. He gets angry easily. He is also very bright. J is in my reading group every morning and every afternoon. I have been working with him and his father to help get…
Today was a snow day, so I decided to look through some paperwork for my student loans that just went back into repayment. I finished my Master’s Degree in June last year and have been slowly receiving all of my repayment information for my loans. I still have a large chunk left to pay on…
Recently I’ve been contemplating what I teach, why I teach it and how I teach it. As a technology teacher I know my job is to teach, well, technology. But these days there’s no such thing as teaching technology in isolation. Correction. There should be no such thing as teaching technology in isolation. As such,…
This past week I was honored to do a guest blog post on Richard Byrne‘s blog Free Technology For Teachers. You can read my post about creating and managing student Diigo accounts through a Teacher Account here. If you don’t already subscribe to Richard’s blog, you should. He provides a plethora of useful links and…
Today started with our new prep schedule on the counter and a note about us teaching our scripted reading program TWICE a day now, with a 30 minute period added at the end of the day. Yay! More robot teaching! In addition, I have students who, due to snow storms, coverage, holidays, etc.. haven’t completed…
For those of you who participate in #edchat (more on what that is here and here), please add to the conversation on our wiki: http://edchat.pbworks.com Jerry Swiatek already updates the wiki with an archive of both weekly discussions, but we have added a page for participants to add resources and success stories. As a moderator,…
As a former Science teacher, I can’t help but reflect on the fact that Science has the power to pull all of the subject areas together. A well designed and executed Science curriculum can incorporate Literacy, Math, Social Studies, Art, Music, Physical Education as well as higher order thinking and creativity. So why do so…
On April 20th, a group of fellow EduTweeters and I will be presenting at the #140 Character Conference in NYC, organized by Jeff Pulver. A very interesting and informative Posterious blog post came through my Google Alerts for my name earlier this week describing the conference. The blogger, Alan Weinkrantz, had this to say: Jeff…
Those of you who have been following this blog may remember that I have been teaching a group of about 17 bright, young students (1st and 2nd graders) in an Enrichment group 5 days a week for 45 minutes. This group is proficient/advanced in reading and tested out of our scripted Corrective Reading program that…
Recently, with all of this change coming to Philadelphia schools, in conversation with fellow educators at the Educon conference and some engaging conversation on Twitter and Google Buzz I’ve been thinking about what a good model of school reform would look like. Many of my colleagues and I agree that expanding the Charter School model…