Bringing technology into the classroom in GA is my day to day...my bread and butter...what keeps the bills paid and the wolf from the door - 80% of the time! This week, my 6th Graders looked at Nat Geo's from the year they were born and discovered how much had changed in their short lives, my 8th Graders used "Today's Meet" for discussion and feedback during a class (they loved it...they felt like they could "talk while I was talking"!) and my 12th Graders used collaborative documents to migrate many ideas and research into one case study about Brownfield sites. Bringing technology into the classroom in GA is my day to day...my bread and butter...what keeps the bills paid and the wolf from the door - 80% of the time! This week, my 6th Graders looked at Nat Geo's from the year they were born and discovered how much had changed in their short lives, my 8th Graders used "Today's Meet" for discussion and feedback during a class (they loved it...they felt like they could "talk while I was talking"!) and my 12th Graders used collaborative documents to migrate many ideas and research into one case study about Brownfield sites. My students are really going deeper with their technology!
Now what about the other 20% of life? That is spent in airports on flights to far flung, exotic locations like...Cookeville, TN and yesterday, Shaker Heights, OH. In these tropical locales, I, mostly with fabulous IBEN colleagues, train other teachers in the MYP Framework and how that applies to their teaching and learning in the classroom and how their students should utilize these approaches to learning in their content areas. IBEN stands for International Baccalaureate Educators Network - a group of specially trained volunteers (yes, you read right - we volunteer!) that rove the country to train and facilitate learning in IB programmes. On Friday, the group above and I delivered the "Launching the MYP" in a Middle School in OH. If the group of faculty in a school to be trained goes over 50 participants - then more workshop leaders need to lead. You see 6 leaders...so you can figure how many teachers we worked with! It's an exhausting 24 hours of flying in, sleeping, prepping, teaching, facilitating endless questions and flying home but worth every minute to work with educators and enlighten the ideals behind MYP! The technology that I use is amazing just in preparation for this kind of work! Uploading documents, collaboration, distribution and paperless and often blended work. It's amazing that in the few short years that I have been involved with the IBEN we've moved from bulky paper workbooks to interactive online tools!
We receive feedback from our participants from online surveys. Occasionally, we get some very negative feedback from a disgruntled individual that just really wants to vent. We learn to take all feedback in terms of "critical friend" philosophy and try to empathize with the negative feedback that a person has elected to share. However, one teacher that I trained in the summer decided to post a personal attack - asking if my demeanor in class was due to me being pregnant (ouch!) and suggested that I might have to take etiquette classes in how to teach adults (double ouch) and lastly informed me - as the final fatal blow, that he/she was uninspired by my workshop (down for the count!). I don't take this lightly (but considering the other 33 of the 34 respondents were very positive I see this geographically as an outlier!) and framed it in the empathetic thought that I would hope never to come across this individual again in a workshop and that life for them must lack any kind of joy if the only satisfaction that they derived was to cut a human who works hard to their very core to achieve satisfaction.
But into every life, some rain (acid in this case!) must fall!.
Now what about the other 20% of life? That is spent in airports on flights to far flung, exotic locations like...Cookeville, TN and yesterday, Shaker Heights, OH. In these tropical locales, I, mostly with fabulous IBEN colleagues, train other teachers in the MYP Framework and how that applies to their teaching and learning in the classroom and how their students should utilize these approaches to learning in their content areas. IBEN stands for International Baccalaureate Educators Network - a group of specially trained volunteers (yes, you read right - we volunteer!) that rove the country to train and facilitate learning in IB programmes. On Friday, the group above and I delivered the "Launching the MYP" in a Middle School in OH. If the group of faculty in a school to be trained goes over 50 participants - then more workshop leaders need to lead. You see 6 leaders...so you can figure how many teachers we worked with! It's an exhausting 24 hours of flying in, sleeping, prepping, teaching, facilitating endless questions and flying home but worth every minute to work with educators and enlighten the ideals behind MYP! The technology that I use is amazing just in preparation for this kind of work! Uploading documents, collaboration, distribution and paperless and often blended work. It's amazing that in the few short years that I have been involved with the IBEN we've moved from bulky paper workbooks to interactive online tools!
We receive feedback from our participants from online surveys. Occasionally, we get some very negative feedback from a disgruntled individual that just really wants to vent. We learn to take all feedback in terms of "critical friend" philosophy and try to empathize with the negative feedback that a person has elected to share. However, one teacher that I trained in the summer decided to post a personal attack - asking if my demeanor in class was due to me being pregnant (ouch!) and suggested that I might have to take etiquette classes in how to teach adults (double ouch) and lastly informed me - as the final fatal blow, that he/she was uninspired by my workshop (down for the count!). I don't take this lightly (but considering the other 33 of the 34 respondents were very positive I see this geographically as an outlier!) and framed it in the empathetic thought that I would hope never to come across this individual again in a workshop and that life for them must lack any kind of joy if the only satisfaction that they derived was to cut a human who works hard to their very core to achieve satisfaction.
But into every life, some rain (acid in this case!) must fall!.