It's One Hour a Week! What about STAAR?

(The picture above is my students working on their passion projects.  This round of projects is learning something you always wanted to know how to do.)

My students have been doing passion projects every week from 10 to 11 am on Wednesdays throughout the year.  We are now heading toward STAAR time, and I will continue to do passion projects, from 10 to 11 am on Wednesdays, each week until the day of the STAAR.  It is a non movable piece of my schedule.  

Some students are learning to make a cake from scratch, learning a language, drawing the anime character they love, building a shelf, and I am sure I am leaving some others out.  This can be deemed unimportant or a waste of time to some, but I have found it to be essential.  My students have begun to learn some very important life lessons through passion projects that they otherwise would not have been exposed to.  

Within this passion project my students have been tasked with building a plan, and executing on that plan to learn something new during this 6 week time frame.  My students are beginning to assess what is important to them, and how to develop a plan to get there.  

Something that I realized this week doing passion projects, my students needed to take time to reflect on their practice and whether it was effective.  I was so surprised what I heard from my students.  One: I need help from experts in the area I am studying.  In previous passion projects I had guided students to contact outside experts.  Yesterday when reflecting multiple students adjusted their plan to reach out to different experts.  Two:  I may need to dedicate more time then the hour a week to reach my goal by the end of the six weeks.  Those students made adjustments to their plans to include time outside school.

Not having a way to end this blog without feeling I am preaching.  Yes I will be dedicating 1 hour of time to passion projects, so my students can build on their capacity to be self guided learner. 

Using All In Learning Clickers in First Grade.

In my class, we use the All In  Learning Clickers program. It is a quick and hands-on program that helps me to monitor students progress. All In program allows me to collect the data we need to incorporate into our lessons to meet the needs of all students. I use the clickers before a lesson as a pre-assessment to see what students know about the topic that we are about to learn, during the lesson I would give short exit ticket to understand what they are learning and then at end of the lesson to see what did the students learned.   The program also helps breaks down the percentage of the class based on how the students did and how they answer each question.  Based on the data that  I get from the clickers I will then decide whether I need to modify to reteach the lesson,   reteach in a small group or move on to the next lesson. The program is fun and the kids love using the clickers. Students said it's like playing a game.

Powerful Humans

When Gutenberg invented the printing press people waited every 6 months for new material. Now we have the world wide web where new pages pop up every 10 seconds, yet still we decide to use our time playing video games and watching meaningless videos online. "Why do we need to know this? This is not something I will need as an adult." We have all heard this before at sometime or another. Is the student right? Is there a purpose for learning scientific notation or fundamental theorems of calculus? Is it the teachers job to make sure that the student knows how to solve the problems according to the steps? Could be. Or maybe its bigger than that. Maybe our job is teaching the students how to self advocate. Teaching the learners how to take control. Teaching the students that what matters is not how to follow the steps to get the right answer, but showing them how to build tools in order to analyze, be strategic, and work smarter - in all aspects of life. You can't teach common sense, but you can teach a kid how to become a responsible learner.   As teachers we must always remember that students will come and go. Many of them will most likely forget the things they learned as they get older. Those fine details in the classroom fade, but impressions will last forever. I want to give my students the impression that they can figure anything out. They will know that its OK to forget things, get answers wrong, or not even know where to begin. They will also know that nothing will be handed to them. If you want an answer, you have the world wide web at your fingertips. Let's teach our students how to learn.

Vanguard - The Beginnings

As I am in my first year of Vanguard, I ponder how I want to change my teaching and help my students go to the next level in the their learning. What risks will I take? 

This year, I have started to mentor a few of my students to learn the process of mentoring through Itslearning. I am taking it slow, so that I can learn the ins and outs of the process. Looking forward to next year, I would like to be able to mentor all of my students and help them to become more aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Every child deserves a mentor who can help them to grow. 

I also believe that every child can learn, but may need other resources/choices to help with the learning. I would like to create choice in my classroom and allow the students to use different tools to show their learning. This year, I have been using itslearning more to give some choice in their learning. I have dabbled with flipgrid as a tool for my students to share their learning and to connect with classes in other states. 

In the past, I have attempted to have a class blog and it has not been very successful. I would love to attempt to have my student blog about their learning and have a authentic audience for them to receive feedback from. I feel that blogging would be away for the students to have a voice and help them become more aware of their learning and growth. 


Let the journey begin!

Back to Basics

Integrating technology into the classroom this year has been a bit of a struggle for me. 

I was excited to begin the school year with all the ideas in my head of the amazing work my students were going to be introduced to and produce. With the kiddos being labeled as 'tech-savvy,' I was ready to hit the ground running with Google Classroom and itsLearning.

To my surprise, my students were able to use computers/iPads when it was something they wanted to do, but when it came to fundamentals on the computer, they were lost looked at me so confused. I was flooded with questions:

• How do I turn the computer on? Why isn't it turning on?
• Where is the browser?
• How do I refresh the page?
• Okay, now where do I go?
• Is it not in Clever? Do I have to type?

As I took a step back and observed my students, they were becoming more frustrated with a task I was excited to start because they had not taken the time to learn how exactly to use technology. I became more frustrated because I was personally teaching keyboard shortcuts, which buttons meant what, and where we actually start typing.

This was EYE.OPENING. In order for us to use devices meaningfully in class, I have had to teach a small snippet of computer fundamentals with each computer time. Instead of having everything available at the touch of a button, my students have had to learn how to type, the keyboard shortcuts, and how to navigate appropriately. 

Though this is still not perfect, I believe as a class we have improved and it's a continuous work in progress! :)

Learning Paths for the First Time

A few weeks ago, my team was presented with the challenge to shift our instruction to personalized learning and flexible grouping to hit the big rocks our kids are having trouble with.  We got great help from our ELA lead and an initial example of how the new process should look like.  Immediately my mind went straight to Itslearning.  Over the years I've realized that I am not the most gifted person when it comes to filing and organizing paper, very often I find myself swamped in towers of never-ending ungraded assignments, I feel overwhelmed and quit.  So when this challenge came to us, it was easy for me to think that the best way to manage their learning paths and the different options for each of my kids was ItsLearning.  I was very excited and ready to start. In my mind, I had a vision of what it should look like and I started to draft and jot ideas for their assignments.  We collected materials, made sure they were in digital form, we created graphic organizers in Google, and then here we go.  The next step was creating the pathways, they needed to be a combination of online and offline resources. We were responding to our students needs to still have a book or a reading selection on paper.  I sat down for a couple of hours with a sketch of the pathways beside my computer, went to Itslearning, created the new plan and started adding resources, soon I noticed that my paths had some resources that needed to be duplicated.  I went the long route and created copies for each of those resources. I was ready for the pathways! That was the part that was exciting me the most, I knew I needed three and so I did.  About 30 minutes later my paths were ready and the troubleshooting began: How do we copy them into my teammate's courses? After a few trials, we realized that we were ignoring one of the best resources Itslearning has: The library.  I copied the path into our library and five minutes later everyone had access. My kids came in, I explained to them what they were about to do and I could see the excitement on their faces. We had a few bumps on the road that first day and we still do, but we keep working through them and little by little they are getting more used to this new way of working... Learning pathways are on their way.

MIA

MIA

I've been out of my classroom for PD and personal stuff four times over the last nine days.   Being out of the classroom sucks.  I missed maybe three days all of last semester.  Between meetings, being dad and working another job, it feels like I will never get caught up.

I know I will, but it has been a very long time since I have felt this way.

Student Goal Setting in Kindergarten

As I was completing Mid Year Testing with my kinder babies, I noticed that kids were getting frustrated because they didn't know all the answers and couldn't do everything they thought they should be able to do. I never told them what they should be able to do, but as we all do, they have this idea that they should be able to answer any question that I ask them correctly. I started showing these kids where they were at the beginning of the year so they could see their growth. This really helped my kids to feel successful and realize that they are learning and growing like they should be. This got me thinking, I really need to do this with all my kids. We are starting small and just creating reading goals, but I would like to add this to math and writing as well. Taking the time to meet with them and talk with them about what they already know and what our next goal is helps them to feel successful and gives them ownership over their goals.