I didn’t write a Slice last week because I’ve been participating in NaNoWriMo, and I spent last Tuesday writing all evening. I did want to share a quick Slice this week because I have a few things on my mind””the first two just housekeeping items. First of all, I’m prepping for attending NCTE at the…
I struggled with whether to write this post or not because digital stories are personal, or they can be personal, but I really believe my students have done good work that is worthy of the world, so I am plunging in. As I have mentioned before, I went to a digital storytelling workshop last summer….
Right about this time of year, teachers everywhere (particularly secondary school teachers) are looking at the calendar and freaking out about what they haven’t covered. I, like many teachers, have fallen into the trap of thinking that certain content has to be covered, even at the expense of engaging in deeper learning, because of time…
I have been writing this blog post in my head for months now, and I’m not sure I will really capture what I’m thinking. I have changed a lot as a teacher over the years. I no longer agree with many of the ideas I expressed earlier in this blog. Perhaps some of the ways…
No one expects a batter to hit a home run on the first try. In fact, even experienced hitters rarely accomplish this feat. Batters strike out more often than they hit, especially at the professional level. We expect it, and we don’t consider it failure because at that level, hitting the ball is difficult. How…
When I taught pre-K, science was my favorite subject to teach because all of the science lessons I taught involved experiments. What happens if you plant a potato eye? What happens if you let an egg sit in a glass of cola? How can you make a tornado out of two bottles? My favorite science…
I have thought for some time that if I ever get myself together enough to write a book in the field of education, my subject would be assessment. It’s probably the issue I think about the most often. It truly bothers me that it’s done so poorly””not just with standardized tests, but also in classroom…
I am asked often enough for recommendations of this sort of thing that I thought I’d share. Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe was the first truly useful and completely life-changing professional development book I read. I utterly altered the way I taught after reading it. It seems obvious to think about larger…
At last year’s annual MassCUE conference, I went to a session presented by Katrina Kennett (@katrinakennett). Her presentation focused on how to use Google Docs to create rubrics, and she outlines the process in this video: She further explains her process and goals in this blog post. I was energized by the presentation and immediately…
In my previous post about Writing Workshop, I explained what an In-Depth Critique looks like in my class. Logistics and tools may be a concern, especially for teachers with a large number of students. My school has Google Apps for Education, but as we do not use the Gmail feature, Google Docs/Drive is probably the…
