NING

Do you use NING in your classroom? Somehow after an amazing course with Dr. Fritz at Penn State last summer, I joined the edubloggerworld on ning, and then she created a network for her class that I joined and participated in during the past month. I have created networks for my classes this year, and I'm really excited to try it out. In the past school year, I have had the students create their own blogs, make posts and make comments on their classmates' blogs. Many of them dreaded it, "Oh no, another blog is due?" I think that sites like ning will be more their speed, but I don't want to drop the blogging entirely. Anyone have feedback? Another thing our district offers is Moodle which I am just trying to figure out so far. I would love to hear if you have any ideas!

student work

Check out my student's work at www.lmmath.blogspot.com!

trial #2 ?

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by lilrunner25

podcast +PPT

Do you make podcasts with powerpoint? Here is a good link: http://www.ppt-to-dvd.com/forum/topic3240.html, I am working on this next week with my high school math classes, if you have any tips.

Boston Marathon

Totally off topic - but I heard that you could qualify for the Boston Marathon with a 1/2 marathon time. Did anyone hear this? And if so, where are these times listed?
:)
Boston '09!

New tools!

What new tools are you using? I just read about Technorati, I know it is not new - what do you use it for? How about Apture? Do you use it? This year I have succeeded in keeping up weekly reading educational blogs and getting my students to blog as well as comment. I might tweak it next year, but I think it has been great. I also want to give them more time to explore the non-math educational aspects of blogging. Right now, for them, it seems forced. I ended up having each kid do a summary of the week and the rest of the class has to comment every 2 weeks of one of the ones that was completed. It forces the person summarizing to review everything and forces the others to constructively criticize as well as read the review. This has been a great success! Over the summer I hope to look at some new tools and incorporate them. I want to check out how other math teachers are incorporating these into their classrooms. The last few months have flew by - can't believe it has been 5 months + since I blogged!!

Summer will be refreshing!

Project Based Learning

I would like to take the curriculum for each of my classes and make them project based and more relevant to real life scenarios. I've started doing this little by little, but it takes up a great amount of time. I have a few thoughts - I think that teachers need more time somewhere built in - otherwise our whole life becomes teaching and planning. If you are dedicated and want the best for your students, teaching is your life and you have little time for the things that you enjoy doing outside of teaching. Second, I graduated high school 10 years ago. Things were not THAT much different then as they are now, as far as careers students were pursuing - yet there was not so much pressure on teachers (that I know of) to change how they teach. I think that it is very important for teachers to teach students what they will need to know for the workplace, but teachers also need the support and time to do so. It is overwhelming to try to differentiate to reach every student, teach in a 21st century manner, and deal with many IEPs for students. How do you do it?