sbisd early adopters

"o piggy back onto my last post about Alan November's call to make students contributors to their own learning, I wanted to share the "Skype Jobs" of my students."

"Students who view mathematics as only memorizing facts and procedures are often unsure of when or how to apply what they have learned. "

"Feel free to contact any of the officers for comments, questions, suggestions or even additions to the newsletter or website. We would appreciate hearing from you! "

"Our Journey of Discovery"

Online discussions & peer feedback; additional links

Pick-A-Path Narrative Writing Project "This year we are co-operatively working on developing a pick a path narrative piece of writing. We have to work together on our main plot but then independently work on the different paths our readers can choose to take. "

Reflection/Debriefing questions for the kids

design challenges

"Dramatizing life stories provides students with an engaging way to become more critical readers and researchers. In this lesson, students select American authors to research, create timelines and biopoems, and then collaborate on teams to design and perform a panel presentation in which they role-play as their authors. The final project requires each student to synthesize information about his or her author in an essay."

"Awesome cloud-based information management tool that enables users to collect, highlight, access and share a variety of information, on a variety of devices."

Team Building Activities

"The learning model that supports artists and inventors, scientists and musicians is a powerful framework that can support the work of readers and writers in our classrooms. When you hear the word workshop, what do you think about? What space do you envision? What tools would you expect to be surrounded with? How do you see the time being used? How would that image change when you put the word "reading" in front of it? The day to day routine of Reader's and Writers Workshop can be broken down to a number of activities, which can be arranged according to your own time table and students. Lessons will vary, depending on your grade, your class needs, but the workshop structure remains the same across grade and content areas."

"Does anyone have any suggestions for apps, uses, or creative ideas for iPad use in the Spanish classroom? I teach 7th grade Spanish and would love to begin implementing iPads into my classroom"

"Poet, playwright, and cultural critic T. S. Eliot was born 124 years ago today. In this passage from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (public library), cited in the 1942 gem Anatomy of Inspiration, Eliot adds to previously explored theories of how creativity works by taking a curious look at how physical illness brings a near-mystical quality of poetry, driven by two key elements of creativity: the presence of an incubation period when unconscious processing of existing ideas takes place, and the removal of habitual inhibitions, or something John Keats has termed "negative capability"."