As a kid, Laura Ingalls Wilder's books always fascinated me. My favorite books in the series were the ones that described being a student and then later teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. If I remember correctly, Laura's first days of teaching were challenging, to say the least. Probably a lot like mine. Like Laura, I wasn't much older than my students when I first walked through the doors of my classroom. It was a crash course in classroom management, but I had one thing going for me that Laura didn't: the teacher down the hall.
Now, with Facebook, Twitter, Nings and other social networking tools, it seems that my first years of teaching were a little like Laura's experience in that one-room schoolhouse, working in a bubble. I'm glad my bubble has burst and that I can collaborate with people across our swiftly shrinking planet.
Case in point: Amy and I found a link to Jim Burke's blog on Facebook. On the blog, he wrote about using Wordles to discuss the big ideas of a text, so we thought we'd try them in our co-taught English I classes. After tweaking a few things (providing marker boards for each team and throwing in a few cooperative learning structures), we found students were engaged in the process. Being able to see the board and hear discussion provided us with immediate feedback on student understanding of theme. Later, we had student teams generate theme statements.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Lessons learned from a one-room schoolhouse
While there were some great things about the one-room schoolhouse, no one could argue that we aren't better as a profession when we collaborate.
Friday, January 8, 2010
My Writing Process
My writing process explained through text-to-video on Xtranormal.com. I made this video in five minutes, check it out!
Race to the Top in Missouri: Your Thoughts
Just posted on the Missouri Ed Community: A forum on Race to the Top funding. Weigh in with your thoughts.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Dave Eggers Talks Authentic Learning
I found this video, from TED, through Twitter on a fellow teachers blog. It's a video of Dave Eggers, principal contributor to McSweeney's and author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius talking about a privately-generated public-service education project that only caught fire when the participants stumbled over real-world authentic tasks for the students. Very exciting.
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