The Undiscovered Country

The school has moved. This ought to be interesting. Everything is new and shiny and I am hoping to keep it that way. My room looks so different from the place I taught for 12 1/2 years. The students and parents have been helping move in a lot of different parts of the building. The one area that has been off-limits so far has been the gym. That will be unveiled on the first day of school. I imagine there are going to be a lot of ooohhs and aaahhhs at that point. The first days is going to be so exciting but is going to be a major change for everyone.

I excited overall but probably most excited about the new way that I am going to be able to use technology in the building. We are going to have a cart of chromebooks for check out for the upper school and middle school classes. I can see myself using those just about every day in my 7th Grade History class. Now that the Internet will be much more available with a server that is actually designed to have bunches of kids using the internet at the same time (not like the old building) I am planning on developing much more for the wiki for each of my history classes. I am still trying to figure out how to invite the kids to become members and will tackle that this week. My plan is for each of them to have a page to put their projects stuff on and then have topics for each of the major areas we are covering. They then will be able to add stuff. I spent one day looking for different media to add to my 6th Grade (Western Civilization) and 7th Grade (Non-Western Culture Focusing on Asia and Africa) pages and added probably 25 videos and another 2050 links just to show the students how it is done. Hopefully I will even be able to have the students blog about what we covered in the class on a weekly basis on the main part of my webpage.

I have some work to do on math so I can finish putting lessons up on the first half of the book. That should not take me too long since I only have a bout 3 more to go. Hopefully the kids remembered how to do percents over the break.

Starting to prepare for my talk at ICE on Flipping my classroom. I borrowed the IPad from the school and have started to experiment with using the Educreations and ShowMe apps. Still trying to figure it out but will over time. My gift to myself this year was a document camera. I am planning on using that to show how to record lessons using that system. I figure it is probably more likely for someone to have access to a document camera or an IPad than a Mobi board. I have a lot to do to plan for this but it should really keep me on my toes for the next couple of months.

No matter what these next few weeks are going to be some of the most exciting in my career.

The End is Here

All that work I put in during the summer was worth it but I have had to start recording lessons again and posting them to YouTube. I started last week and plan to do a few lessons over the weekend so I can stay ahead of the students. We are moving on to percents and I have started to put together some of the graphics that I will need to keep going. It was definitely worth it and it seems to have helped quite a few students and even parents to understand the math more effectively. One thing that I am looking forward to this year is the semester exam. I am going to give back to the students copies of their tests from the six chapters we will have covered and let them know which videos they should review before the test. Hopefully this targeted review will be better than the one I normally do that covers all of the material. Since we are moving to a new building with better internet capabilities the students should be able to all watch at the same time different lessons.

Just today I found out that my proposal for the ICE conference has been accepted. I am going to be presenting on flipping a classroom by using wikis and videos. I have until the start of March to put something together and I hope that I will as interesting as the people who I have learned from at ICE before. I am hoping to borrow an IPad from the school so I can see how to use it to develop lessons through that format. Exciting times and busy times.