Coming Up Next: A New Year

I've dived into the deep end this year... Somebody should remind me to look next time! This year will probably be hectic, and interesting. I'm not sure yet if interesting is a good thing or a bad thing, but give me a few weeks and I'll see if I can't figure it out.

I have two new roles this year at my school: autism resource & team-taught history. My school has had some success integrating the principals of Universal Design into science classes, and so now they would like to try history. Its not exactly a secret that I have a laptop welded to my back while at school, but I wasn't aware anybody knew about my secret passion for non-fiction documentary-style books and movies, especially 20th Century history. Or that I worked at a Renaissance Faire, and minored in history in college. Guess I need to hide that weakness a little better...
The autism resource is also really not a surprise: I worked as an autism teacher for an extended school year program when I started teaching, have always had at least one student in my classes who had an autism spectrum disability, and spent 3 years working at place known for their work with kids with autism.

School opens for students on Tuesday, and so I've been creating materials for Basic Skills this weekend, and trying to help the general education teachers I'm teaming with adapt materials for history. The students who have had me for Basic Skills before know that I like to do projects... This has not changed. Our first project will have them invent a product, research a real version of the product using Wikipedia. Side note: Do NOT twit at me about using Wikipedia in school; if we don't show the students how to use it properly, how will they ever learn? Just like we need to teach students about advertising, we need to teach how to use other media resources! The last part will have them create a commercial for their product. Originally, I was going to have them make a commercial of themselves, but decided to do the group thing. And, while I have access to a video camera, I'm not sure if doing that first thing in the school year is a good idea... Thanks to the UD Tech Toolkit I found a cool site called Animoto. There is a version of Animoto for schools to use, but I created this in about 5 minutes using the regular site. Very, very cool. So, I may use this for their commercials. It is a lot more structured, and much easier to use than actually creating a video themselves.

New School Year Update

I worked this morning with my supervising principal, and the Dean of our special education department to get my schedule straight. I will be doing the Precision Teaching gig half time (3 periods per cycle; 2 on one day, and 1 on another). I have one block of Functional Academics the last period of the day every other day.
That left 3 periods... Imagine my surprise when my principal said that he, our Dean, and head principal were thinking about having me create materials and work with other teachers to integrate technology within the special education department!! I will get to spend one block, every other day, doing that exact thing.
I think it was here a few days ago (or not, as I don't see it) that I said that I didn't know of any jobs that would let me work with students, give me time to create materials, and attend conferences. I am totally happy to settle for 2 out of 3 of those, especially since I will get to attend a conference this year!
I am already looking at ways to make this work... I had thought about working with our AT person on another grant opportunity, as well as submitting a continuation grant (This Is My Life: Kicked Up!) to the Loudoun Educational Foundation (LEF). LEF was the organization that provided the grant for our digital camera project (This Is My Life: Using Digital Media To Increase Literacy Skills) in the 2006-2007 school year. We haven't decided yet, but we're looking at either podcasting or video as the addition to the project this year.
I've also been talking about my own ideas for this year, and some of the other teachers were interested.
One of the goals for my school this year is to increase the use of data collection to determine outcomes for students. I think that we could make our lives a little easier for some types of data collection if we use Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and photo sharing. The students could respond to various prompts in blogs, thus allowing us to collect running writing samples for the whole year. They could post materials created on their wiki, and demonstrate all kinds of skills this way, and with photo sharing. Teachers benefit, because they could literally look at student work ANYWHERE, and not have to lug home 80 folders full of writing.
We may also use a wiki and blog to communicate information about Key Club to members. I offered to give space over at my classroom blog, and also on the classroom wiki.
Lastly, but certainly not least, we have received all the information from Microsoft for the Innovative Teacher Forums. I just set up my personal space on the Forum, and linked back here, and to my professional wiki.

We're baaack... Part 2

Apparently, our overall "fun theme" for the year will be based on The Simpsons. When the show started, I definitely wasn't a fan. I can't say that I watch it glued to the TV now (actually, I don't think I watch much of anything glued to the TV screen!), but I do appreciate more of the humor. And, in my own personal form of 'preja vu' (deja vu that happens before you knew about it being deja vu), I named the blog that my students will use 'Doughnut Drive'. That's the name of the hallway where our classroom is... and on one side of our blog is a great picture of Homer Simpson trying to eat this huge doughnut! I just loved that!
Okay, so right about now you're waiting for me to tell you how all of this ties into web 2.0...
The videos, the homer simpson tie-in, are all available to people to use because of web 2.0! Schools have always shown "inspiring videos" during in-services. But, in the not-so-distant past, those videos were put together by people who were assigned this as a job. People who were usually in marketing or PR, maybe an AV department. An ordinary teacher, person, parent could not have done this just 5 years ago!
I love the amount of information that is out there and available. I like being able to go to Google and type in a few words and find all of this information. I love being able to go to the website for my University, and looking at the entire selection of journals that is available without ever leaving my futon and my cat. I've been attending Johns Hopkins in various forms (with some breaks) since 1999. My first master's degree is from Hopkins in transition planning & severe disabilities. With luck, I'll finish a second degree (Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study, another 30 credits) in curriculum design and assistive technology at the end of Fall semester. I've never set foot in the Eisenhower library on the Homewood campus. Not one time. I used to go to a closer community college library, but now I don't even have to do that. I just load up my VPN software, type in my password, and convince the library's computer that I am really in the library.
Lovely. Absolutely lovely. And now, I'm going to go fix a slideshow in Slide Share, and then finish & post the final project for my graduate class this semester.

Its About Time

I have been telling myself that I should create a more personal blog for several months now. My students blogged for a bit last year, and I contributed a few entries to their efforts. And, toward the end of the year, I explored LiveJournal as part of a graduate class. In June, I signed up to blog with my students on David Warlick's site and added 3 blogs to the RSS feed on my Google homepage. Yet, I still put off creating my own blog.
Then, it happened. In the space of a few days, I had requests for various materials I had created or discussed on two different listservs. I've always just sent the materials to other people via email. That isn't a bad choice, but what if other people on the list also want the materials? Then I send email to more and more people. I reasoned with myself, and decided that if I (finally) created that blog I was thinking about, I could share things more easily.
But, really, that wasn't a good enough reason to create a whole blog. The final deciding point came when I talked to another teacher friend and asked her to look over a proposal for something I want to do with my students. She is willing to do it, but she isn't a special education teacher, and she doesn't use technology in her classroom the way I do. At which point the proverbial light bulb came on, and said, "Put it on the blog! Put it ALL on the blog!"....