Forever a First Year Teacher

I saw this blog post that PLTW put out about building community for distance learning . It's by Dr Kathryn Kennedy and I liked the guidelines she laid out, so I decided to write some thoughts using her guidelines as prompts. Here they are: To ensure that I keep things neat and clear, Google Classroom will be the starting point, the “HUB”. I want this because it is a technology that they are already familiar with. Then the question is how to structure my classroom so that there is a flow from activity to activity. I believe that having too many “Topics” can disrupt this flow because it makes it difficult to view things in chronological order. An exception may be to have topics set up by quarter so that students know which assignments belong to which quarter. One other option may be to have topics that are “Can Do” and “Must Do”. In that scenario, the “Must Do”s would still be listed in chronological order. My preferred method is to have no topics and just list your assignments in th...

I am currently working on my National Board Certification Renewal. That means it's been 10 years since I was first certified, and it also means that I am reflecting on those years in order to write about how I've grown as a teacher. One thing I learned today is that it is really easy to find evidence of my teaching and learning because I used to be good at blogging . 😀 So I am determined to pick up the practice once again for two reasons: It'll make me a better teacher. Just like it did all those years I was doing it regularly, blogging will force me to document what I'm learning and reflect on it in the process.  It'll make it easier to renew ten years from now when I'm doing this again. This reason is secondary, but still important and something I can keep in mind if I'm ever feeling like *not* blogging. So here I go once again. Back into the blogging world after being gone for a while. I remember a thing I used to tell myself all the time was that the bl...