Teacher blogs and twitter followings

Ok, so you’re a teacher who is interested in professional development and how web 2.0 is influencing education and teachers. What blogs do you read and whose tweets do you follow? Go!

6 Weeks Left

With only 6 weeks left of school, I ask myself:  “What incredible bits of knowledge must I impart on my students in these last few weeks?”  The answer:  I haven’t got a clue.  While visiting with an elementary school teacher this weekend, she shared that she was excited for the weeks after testing so she could do something fun with her kids.  Alright, I’m down.  What fun, standards-based and content-based activity can I do for 7th-grade math?  The art teacher already stole tesselations, which I think is a crime.  Come on?!  What do I have to work with here?  Tesselations were my slam dunk my first two years teaching, and then she took it last year and I was left with not very exciting standards posters.  While my students did learn how to break down a standard and reflected on what they learned last year, it was not “fun,” and I was still pulling teeth to get them to work. Any ideas?

Friday…

Thank goodness it’s here.

Results…

After some talk with others, I decided to keep the notes and the review activities. I shortened some things during class so the students would get to interact more with the material rather than just copy notes, and that seemed to help quite a bit. I’ve been thinking about the whole CST results situation recently. If my scores go up, does that make me “good” at my job? If my scores go down, does that make me “bad” at my job? Do only good teachers’ scores go up and vice versa? How do you interpret state test scores?

Reviewing…

In Pre-Algebra we alternate days of review notes and activities. For six days they make mini-book review notes and for the other ten days of CST review they play a myriad of games. On notes days, there is a lot of talking and I feel bad because I know it’s a lot of material to cover, but on game days, they need the notes. I’ve tried not doing the notes before, but then my classes with kids who struggle more have no recollection of how to do the problems. Topics we spent two weeks on previously in the year seem to be astrophysics to some of them! I want to re-structure this for next year (or even next week!), but I’m not quite sure how. My honors kids will get no review notes, but a game or activity every day. The discrepancy occurs because the honors kids will open their book or notes to find the answer and help each other to remember. There is also greater retention to begin with. Am I being unfair to my kids who struggle more? Should we just jump in to the games and see who sinks or swims? What about fill in the blank notes as opposed to making them from scratch? I’m afraid they won’t really remember/learn anything this way. What do you do when you go to review a concept and the kids seem to think they’ve never heard of the concept before?