Conversations Update

So, I’ve been thinking more about having more individual conversations with my students. And so I told them. This morning I was updating my class on a few things at the beginning of the day, typical stuff. I also explained, like I did in my last post, that I had so enjoyed talking with a [...]

Blogging in the Hallway, Update

So, I’ve been thinking about our paper blogging. We are starting with this format to develop some good habits before we head out into the blogosphere. At the moment the students’ blogs are hanging in the hallway outside our classroom. We have a desk out there with supplies for commenting (post-its and pens) and a [...]

School as a Conference, Update

So, I’m just getting to making some sense of the evaluations of our “Who Owns History?” conference. The first thing I did was just average (or rather tell the spread sheet to average for me) the rating for the day (1-5 scale). The average was 4.4. I’d say that’s a pretty good start. So, the [...]

My Room is Finally Ready

So, I’ve been thinking about room arrangement all year. I started with a new format at the beginning of the year, changed it up a little based on some student input; then had the students plan and vote on a new arrangement. All that didn’t quite push the boundaries as much as I wanted. So, [...]

Bringing in the Experts

So, I’ve been thinking and writing about seating arrangement a lot this year. Just on the off-chance that you didn’t catch those earlier posts, I’ll summarize quickly. I did some reading over the summer about seating and then bought tables from IKEA that were not only inexpensive, but easily move around the room. Then, even [...]

A Different Perspective

So, I’ve been thinking about seating arrangementt this year. I’ve written about my ideas and my new IKEA tables and how well I think the new plan is going. Then, I had to rearrange, briefly, for ERB testing. I hated it. The desks were in rows; the students were all facing me when we were [...]

iPad Update, the Shortest Version

So, I’m still thinking about iPads and my 1-1 iPad experiment. Here’s how I might summarize it in as few words as possible: Are the iPads everything I could ever want? NO Is being a 1-1 (of some sort of technology) classroom what I want? YES Would I like laptops sometimes? YES Has anyone offered [...]

5E Day, Update

So, I’ve been thinking about our class climate. In the beginning of the year I had what I called “5E Day” with my class, which was loosely based on George Couros’ Identity day. (Read about it here and about its impact here.) One of the comments to my description of the resulting class tone wondered [...]

iPads Appear in my Closet, Update

So, I’ve been thinking about iPads. As my regular readers, all 3 of them, know, I am now the proud teacher of a class with 1 iPad per student. This post is a little overdue, but with all the excitement and then all the holiday cooking and eating, I got behind on a number of things. [...]

Overheard in October

So, here’s October’s round-up of things I overheard in 5E this past month. (Name) was on fire! Yeah, she was! [After looking at another student's vocab strip that shows students use of weekly vocab words in speaking], I need to start saying the words. I like using the computer more than writing stuff down. I [...]