My Very First Post

Starting a blog has seemed like a pretty daunting task, but when I look how far I have come in the last year as a  teacher, I figured why not give it a shot.  I have spent the last six years teaching Middle School math and English in a small, private school in Minnesota.  While I love the small setting, there are drawbacks. For one, no one else in my school teaches exactly what I do, so bouncing ideas off of others is a little more difficult.  I feel that at times I fell into a rut of doing what I knew, which is mostly the lecture during class and sending students off to do their own homework.  However, this routine, which seems to be so typical of our classrooms, left me, as well as most of my students, probably, yearning for something more.  I wanted to be able to answer that question, "When am I ever going to use this?"

During my fifth year of teaching I took half of the year off to have my son and spend some time with him.  I will admit, going back to work in the fall after a wonderful seven months off was difficult.

 

At the end of the summer, before going back to work I attended an Apple workshop where I heard many interesting presentations.  My school had invested in a cart of Ipads and I wanted to know how I could integrate this technology into my classroom.  This workshop gave me back some of the fire I feel I had been missing; I feel like things just started to click, and I was suddenly very inspired to try a bunch of new things in my classroom.  After hearing about Edmodo I decided that I was going to use this as a tool in my classroom to connect my students even more outside of class.  It was here that I was also first introduced to the idea of the "Flipped" classroom.  While I did not plan on flipping my classroom right away, the idea of recording my lessons as I taught helped fill a void I had of how to help students when they miss class, or even more so, how to help one of my students with dyslexia who struggled to keep up in class with listening and taking notes.

 

So I flipped my 8th grade Algebra class, and then I actually moved them to a mastery approach because I had such a wide skill set in my class. I was frustrated with holding back students ready to move on, but still leaving others behind by moving them on before they were ready and the mastery approach helped with that.  While all of the students said at the end of the year that they enjoyed this approach, I did have a couple of students who did not get through as much material as I would have liked them to, but at least I know they had a solid understanding of the material they did "master".

 

This summer I have been expanding my horizons through workshops and introducing myself to twitter trying to find ways to improve my students' experiences in class even more. These workshops and twitter are also what motivated me to start this blog.  I wanted to have a place to ask questions, get input, reflect and share what has worked and was hasn't.  After all, as educators it is best if we share with one another; there is so much we can learn from one another. 

 

If you haven't seen it, I was introduced through twitter to Adam Bellow's keynote speech from ISTE13 about changing the world.  It is well worth the watch.  Forward to minute 23 to jump to Adam.

 

After all, don't we all dream of being a superhero and helping to change the world?