sbisd early adopters

"Building a relationship means that you've opened a door for them to learn, making them receptive to what you have to say and giving them confidence to contribute as well."

"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."

"Our Journey of Discovery"

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

"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."

" When you're trying to teach people how to do something new on their computers having screencast videos or annotated screen capture images can be invaluable to you and the people you're trying to help. Here are some free tools that you can use to create screen capture videos and images. "

Here's the answer to my screencasting conundrum! While trying to create screencasts of some of my most "popular" (a.k.a. retaught) lessons, I kept running into various issues with Jing ( one of my favorite "freebies"). This blog has not only one suggestion, but several! Woohoo!

"Often students are called upon to make presentations for class projects, and many are eager to break out of the mold of the standard PowerPoint and do something really special."

"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"."

"Exceptions don't contradict what I'm trying to explain here, but rather prove the point that: A tool is just a tool! I can use a hammer to build a house and I can use the same hammer on a human skull. It's not the tool, but how you use it that matters."

Response to Andrew Hacker's New York Times Op-Ed essay "Is Algebra Necessary?" Includes examples and links to CCSS