Ideas for Next Year…Already?

The end of the school year brings a lot of things for teachers: frantic efforts to help students pass, piles of grading, the ritualistic cleansing of the classroom, and of course, a couple of days off before we start preparing for next year.
Of course, for the obsessive among us, we have already begun planning, plotting, [...]

Obama’s Inauguration Speech: Reflections and Implications for Education

I had the privilege of watching the inauguration this morning with my students. Our school was kind enough to extend our first period so we could finish listening to President Obama’s inauguration speech. First, a couple of thoughts on the process:

Since we don’t receive any sort of cable signal, our building tried an interesting idea: [...]

Virtual Whiteboards

One of my colleagues got me interested in a fairly new web 2.0 technology: virtual whiteboards. Imagine sitting in a room full of people, all of whom have a marker. Together they all make changes to a plan or illustration, add comments, etc., and all on the big whiteboard at the front of the room. [...]

Top 5 Lessons I’ve Learned About Blogging

I’ve been blogging for a while now. I had a personal blog in college that a few of my close friends read. Almost a year ago now, I chose to start blogging about my thoughts, experiences, ideas, and questions around education and teaching. I’m proud (and more than a little surprised) to say that there [...]

Goals for This Year

I just had my annual goals meeting with our administrator and thought it would be worth sharing the three goals I’ve set for myself this year. They’re each fairly specific and I’ll probably be inquiring about other teachers’ solutions to these in the near future.
1. Develop a stronger understanding of how to teach the writing [...]

A Quick Review

Still trying to force myself to make time to post more regularly during my planning period. I think once I get into a routine during plan periods, it will help: update website, respond to parent emails, post, plan. Seems simple enough…
That said, here’s a quick summary of the first couple weeks of the 2008-2009 school [...]

Speech recognition software

This is my first post using Microsoft speech recognition software.  Using a laptop, Windows Vista, and the installed software, I can dictate anything I want a type.  This is an interesting technology.  While I’m not sure what uses I would have for it, it seems to accurately dictate anything I say and if it doesn’t, [...]

Writing Conferences

I’ll try to post a more thorough update this weekend when I have time, but for now, I needed to throw this out there.
I’ve been starting writing workshop conferences with students. It’s really my first time making a very concerted effort to work with students during the writing process, rather than simply grading essays (all [...]

Fall Preview: Putting This Blog in Context

Via huffenglish (who also used the idea), Casting Out Nines – a higher ed math and technology blog – posted a “Fall Preview” that details what courses he will be teaching and some of the ideas and issues he’ll be dealing with as he begins the new school year.
Since I like the idea, and I appreciate [...]

Unpublished Posts

Something I’ve recently been experimenting with is not publishing all of my posts (like this one) right away. Initially, the idea hit me when I wanted to write a Voki post but was having trouble getting Voki to load properly (more of a computer issue than a site issue). In the meantime, I had a couple [...]