MACUL

After attending the MACUL conference last week in Detroit, I had a chance today to sit down and process all of the incredible information and ideas that I want to implement in my classroom. This conference made me aware of all of the wonderful things going on in other classrooms and school districts and the potential my own classroom has. The collaboration that I was lucky to be part of at this conference was second to none. Everyone was so kind and helpful. I walked away from this conference with this new class blog already set up and a new member of Twitter. (I always wanted to tweet!) I connected with several inspiring people from the conference on Twitter. Please follow me on Twitter to get daily updates on our classroom and other educational thoughts.

With all of this new and inspirational knowledge, I am starting with Class Dojo tomorrow. This an amazing classroom management tool. You can download it as a free app from the App Store, but can also be accessed through the website www.classdojo.com. You create your class in this program and then students can choose an avatar. Throughout the day, you can award positive points for good behavior and following expectations and you can take away points for not making good choices. The teacher can invite parents so they can track their child throughout the school day. There is also a messaging feature in which teachers can message parents and parents can message the teacher. There is a letter you can print from the website to send home to parents explaining the program and how to be added to their child's class. I have my class set up on Class Dojo and will be inviting parents starting tomorrow. It seems pretty late in the year to start a new classroom management program; however, I am really excited about this and want to do a test run for the rest of this school year to see if it is something I will want to do for next school year. We already do have a positive behavior management system in my classroom tied to our superhero theme this year. I will also tie in the points from Dojo to our current system.

I also learned about some great formative assessment tools from the conference that will make assessing more fun for the teacher and the student,  it will make it much easier to assess students, I will get valuable data from it to drive my instruction, and I get to use technology. What is not to love, right? We do not have 1:1 technology at our school; however, I have access to some awesome pieces of technology like 8 iPads, 2 iMacs, a classroom set of Chrome Notebooks that I share with another teacher, and a classroom set of laptops that are on a cart and shared school wide. So, I think I can make this work. Plickers is a formative assessment tool that does not require 1:1 technology. I plan on using this a lot in the future. Some other great formative assessment tools I learned about and plan to look into include Socrative, Near Pod, and Pear Deck. Totally worth looking into. The last tool that I plan on using a lot more in my classroom is Kahoot. I have used this a few times in the past as a formative assessment with my students, but I would like to use it a lot more. It is such a fun program and the kids won't even know they are being assessed. It almost seems like a game.

During our closing keynote speakers, 2 Guys and an iPad, (check out their podcast) at the end of the conference, we were asked to get out our devices and tweet as much as possible during the presentation. My first thought was, "What?! Shouldn't we be paying attention and hanging on your every word rather than playing around on social media?" (This was totally the teacher in me coming out.) But, quickly I learned the value in this. I started tweeting the most important quotes and ideas to me from the presentation. Quickly I saw that I was actively engaged and actively listening to the presentation while I was tweeting. I also had a summary of the presentation on my Twitter wall when the presentation was over and some great, inspirational quotes to return to at a later date when I need a pick me up. I realized how powerful technology really is and that we should embrace it in our classrooms and find a way to make it a valuable piece of our day. Thanks to the  2 Guys, one last idea I would like to implement yet this school year is the classroom Twitter Wall. What kid doesn't like social media? It's in our life, so we need to use it in valuable ways and we can do this in our classrooms. Through this our students can learn how to use social media appropriately before they are using it independently as teenagers. My students are too young to have a Twitter account, nor would I want them to have one at this age, so we are going to make a Twitter Wall that is made up of laminated sentence strips with a basket of dry erase markers close by. Every morning the students must Tweet when they come into the classroom (write a thought on the Twitter Wall using the dry erase markers. This will let me know how each student is doing and it will also allow the students to share something they feel is really important.

I am excited for the rest of this school year! Teachers are students for life and always learning!

Starting Over...

I was not entirely happy with my class's Wordpress website I created 6 years ago and was hoping for some fresh ideas at the 2015 MACUL Conference. I am happy with this transformation and my introduction to educational blogging. Here we go!