Say Whaaaaaaaaaaat?!?!

So yesterday I posted about ClassroomScreen.com which is a great website that I use with my interactive whiteboard. I put a link up on twitter, because I need other people's validation and wanted to share my work with them (it's also on Facebook, but that's neither here nor there). Not two minutes after I posted it I hear from one of my old assistant principals. He is now the principal at one of the other schools in our district, and they haven't been given their Promethean Boards yet. He's always been pretty tech savvy, and it saddened me that they were like the last on the list of schools to receive the technology upgrade, since everyone else has had theirs since last year. Aaaaaaanyway he asked me if I would be willing to lead a professional development with his teachers to show them how to use their new Promethean Boards for next school year!

I'm so excited and I'm glad for the opportunity to share with other adults what I've been doing in my classroom (you know the whole reason I started this blog). I am very flattered to be considered for this opportunity, and I hope that I'm able to help them out. I have all of summer to get my presentation together, and since it's about technology it has to be epic. I already know a few of the things I'm going to talk about:

• Hooking up the document camera
• ClassFlow
• ClassroomScreens
• Maybe ClassDojo

If you guys know of anything else that you use with your Promethean/Smart Boards please let me know so I can research it during the summer and share it with them!
Happy Learning,
Casey

ClassroomScreen.com

This year my district joined the many others across the nation by putting in interactive whiteboards in the classrooms. We went with some touch screen Promethean Boards, and so far it's been pretty nice. I do enjoy getting to write on PowerPoints, or having students draw diagrams that go along with word problems, it's really fun! But when you're done with direct instruction and you move to independent practice, then you have to pull up the web page that has the count down timer, you've got to repeat your directions 10 different times, tell the kids to be quiet every 5 minutes, give your behavior expectations, and no matter how many times you've pointed out the location of the clock no student will ever look at it because 'I don't know how to tell time on that clock'.

Instead of worrying about all of that, there's one website that you can go to:

The site comes with 10 built in applications.

Each of the apps serves a unique purpose instead of having to use a bunch of different websites. This has saved me time because I'm not having to answer the same questions 10 times, and it lets me focus on helping the students with their work. I'm going to be honest and tell you that I don't use all of the different apps, but I will explain them to the best of my ability.

1. Random Name Generator- Instead of using the popsicle sticks to call on students this could be a replacement. You paste in a copy of your roster and it gives you a random name from your list. Downside is that if you're like me and you have several classes it doesn't work so great. The Dice roller would be great if I taught probability, I could see this being easier than passing out a die to groups of students and telling them to start rolling. (I don't use this app)
2. Sound Level- if you have a microphone attached to your screen it works. You can set the appropriate noise level you want and the bar turns red when the kids go over that range. (I don't have a microphone on my screen so I can't use this)
3. QR Code- if you are having your kids go to a certain site and you're tired of them typing it in wrong and tiny.url isn't working all you have to do is type in the website you want them to visit and it will create a QR Code for that specific site for the kids to scan. (I don't use this one)
4. Drawing Window- there are two different sizes for the drawing window, but they both work the same way. The kids like using them more than I do. It's a little basic but it gets the job done.
5. Text box- I use this for all of those directions that kids ask for 12 times, like page numbers. Now they know where to look when they have a question about what they're supposed to be doing. Of course you can use it for so much more than that.
6. Work Symbols- these are to set behavior expectations for students. Again so you don't have to repeat yourself a bunch of times. My students told me that these seemed better for Elementary kids and they don't like it when I use them.
7. Traffic Lights- I have no idea how I would use them in the classroom, but I'm sure someone does.
8. Timer/Stopwatch- pretty self explanatory. It's a big display so it's easy to see across the room. I don't like that when its done ticking all you get is a little bell chime. Still works well, although sometimes it's a little glitchy and doesn't work well on touch screen.
9. Clock- I like that the clock has both the digital and analog clock screen. It also has 12 and 24 hour modes if you're in to that kind of thing. It does also have the date on it, but it's small and hard to see sometimes, as one of my coworkers learned the hard way when an administrator took off points from her evaluation for not having the date posted.
10. Background- I like the background changer because there are 35 different ones to choose from. My favorite one is the waterfall that is a GIF and you can relax as you watch the water cascade down (5/5 stars). Or you can go on a journey across the world with scenes from The Outback, Rome, Paris, New York, India and so much more. 

I learned about ClassroomScreen from the technology specialist at my school. He noticed that some of the teachers were hesitant to use their new whiteboards when we still had the old school projectors hooked up. This was a great way for teachers to play around with the new hardware, while also learning about a new resource to use in their classroom. Even if you don't have an interactive screen, this would work great with regular projectors. I suggest taking some time to play around with it, or letting your students run wild with it. Either way it's something that I use in my class almost everyday, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Happy Learning,
Casey

Yea this is a rant... But content to follow

Okay, so let's get this out of the way... I'm a terrible person who's bad at scheduling and keeping up with my own personal life (or lack there of) and this blog got pushed to the back burner... for 8 months. I've been a little disenchanted with teaching for awhile and I've been avoiding thinking about it while I'm off the clock.

So basically this school year I've just been going home and scrolling Pinterest on my phone (because the mobile app is so much better than their browser version), and I have developed an addiction to Cool Math games (who really needs to get more thinking outside the box games). But recently I've found a reason to dive back in (thanks Ms. Barber)!

I'm not going to share this post on my other social media accounts, so if you're reading this that means that you either are really into my blog (hey Shirley!) or are just one of the random traffic. Either way I'm cool with it and I'm going to start my rant now.

This year my district is dissolving the Intermediate School system. They are moving 5th grade back down to Elementary School and moving 6th grade up to Middle School. In order to fit the new grades coming in, and to keep up with community growth they decided to open 3 new Middle Schools. Then their plan was to pick 1 person per subject per grade level from every campus and reassign them to the new schools. For the most part it seems like they went with the "last in, first out" rule. EXCEPT FOR MY CASE! I'm not the last 8th grade Math teacher hired, but the other teacher is also the Algebra teacher so they don't want to move her *pout face* (plus the old Algebra teacher is trying to move back here also...)

I have been assigned to a school that is twice as far from my house, and is two stories. A two-story Middle School. It looks like the grabbed the plans for a high school and then changed their minds last minute. It's massive, and I'm scared. On top of that the administrative staff is all coming from an Intermediate School. That means that they're used to dealing with 5th and 6th graders, and I'm not sure if they're going to be able to handle all the fun and games that comes with 7th and 8th graders. I'm sure they behavior isn't going to be all that different; the kids are still going to fight and cuss and throw things, but in 7th and 8th grade they're stronger so they can punch harder and throw heavier stuff! And other people are worried about the 8th grade boys preying on the 6th grade girls. I had my first pregnant student this year and I have no idea how this 14 year old is going to get through High school. I can't even imagine an 11 or 12 year old trying to survive that.

Obviously I'm not the only person who isn't happy with the way that things are turning out, so my district decided to have a special job fair for the people who got reconfigured. And I went because I want to stay at my current school, plus I interviewed at a couple other schools. And I never heard back from any of them. Schools are only allowed to fill positions once the current teacher has vacated the position. This means that most of the schools that were at the job fair had no open positions, or they were holding some in hopes that they could keep some of the teachers that were taken from their school (which is what my principal is trying to do for me).

After that job fair we were supposed to have to district wide transfer fair, but because of the earlier job fair disaster they decided to cancel the fair and told people to just contact the school you want to transfer to and set up an interview outside of school hours. To top it all off, the district how now implemented a hiring freeze. Turns out that not everyone who was pulled from a school was given a new placement. Everyone is under contract so they have to put them somewhere, where they are certified to to teach. So until they place all of those new people my current principal won't know if she will have an opening for me next year.

Oh my God it feels good to get that all off my chest! Now I remember why I used to post so often, because this is waaaaaaaay cheaper than going therapy lol. Thank you to all the 12 people who are going to read this, and if you're a teacher out there who's frustrated and feels like you're struggling, you can leave a ranting comment, it feels amazing to vent. See you guys next time!

I'm sorry I lied....

Ok so I lied, I said that the next post was going to be about Promethean's ClassFlow software, but I've since found that there's a metric crap ton of things that you can do with the program so I'm still playing around with it. And also I haven't spoken to ANYBODY about a possible interview (I've told you guys I'm a lazy introvert right?).  I will be talking to some people today about my next project, Remind.com (used to be Remind101).

Plus if you've noticed my blog is kind of going through an identity crisis so I'm still trying to figure out all the things that I can do on Blogger and whether or not I should connect this with a Google Site (I'm probably going to do that). So in the next few weeks, months and years to come I'll be solidifying what I want my digital presence to look like.

Or maybe things won't go according to plan and you'll still be able to read about me here. Only time will tell LOL.

I Haven't Forgotten You

This year has been a blur so far. It's already the 2nd 9 weeks, I've been having to deal with grades, benchmark exams, LEP accommodation folders, and sooooooo much more.

This is just a little up date to tell you guys that I haven't forgotten about my blog, and that I'm still playing around with the new technology stuff I learned at TCCA this year. I've got some good stuff coming up to tell you guys about!

Also something that I've been kind of wanting to do is to interview some different teachers I know and work with to try and get their take on the different technology they use, and to offer some new perspectives since it's normally just me that you guys (all 3 of you lol) are used to reading from. So I've got a goal for myself that I'm going to reach out to some people and see if they're interested in collaborating on something in the future. Or at least I hope they do :)

Oh and before I forget I just wanted to let you guys know that I've gotten to experience something as a 'veteran' teacher! Since this is my 3rd year teaching I've started to hear back from some of my old students. It's an awesome feeling that I wanted to share with you guys. So first off they remembered me, two they took time out of their day to let me know they were thinking about me, and three it always seems that they days you hear from old students are the days when you need the pick-me-up the most.

So thank you to my babies from years past who have come to see me or emailed me. It meant so much to me and I'm glad I made a lasting dent in your mind.

Up Next: ClassFlow the Promethean software!!!!!

TCCA 2017

First off, Happy Columbus Day! Luckily I have today off of work, and I've realized I haven't posted since Hurricane Harvey. A few things have happened since then so I'm gonna take a minute to catch you up on what's been going on in my life:

• My house did not flood in Harvey- my grandmother's house on Lake Houston flooded but we managed to salvage all the old family photos and some of the heirlooms from the property
• My school did not get flooded- we did have some water leak in through the roof, but no major damage; some students lost everything and I had a former student email me checking up on us and his house flooded
• I finally managed to get back into the swing of things with my students and the 1st 9 weeks will be over soon
• I went to a staff development on Friday and that wasn't so exciting
• Saturday I went to a technology conference and that's what has me so excited today!!!!

It was such an amazing conference and I learned plenty of new things that I'm going to have to play around with so I can let you guys know about them. 

The conference I went to was TCCA which is Technology and Curriculum Conference of Aldine ISD its a partnership Aldine has with TECA. They put this FREE conference every year and it's open to the public. There were people there from Aldine, New Caney, Tomball, Klien, Alief, Humble and so many other places.

The keynote was given by Rafranz Davis who is the Director for Professional and Digital Learning for Lufkin ISD. I did miss the first part of her speaking, but the rest of her talk was very interesting. My favorite part was when she talked about how technology was creates equal access for people. We don't all have the same opportunities to get to places, but we all have access to the same internet. You can connect and learn more about Ms. Davis on twitter at @rafranzdavis.


After the keynote there were 5 different sessions that you could attend. The first one that I went to was Kid's Deserve It with Todd Nesloney @techninjatodd. I'd heard him talk before when I was in college, because A&M asked him to come and talk to all of us teachers before we headed out for student teaching, and that was before he published his book. He talked a lot about how he integrates technology into his elementary school. The main idea that I walked away with was that we can't teach kids the way we were taught. Just because it was good enough for us doesn't mean it's good enough for them. If we want to get them ready for the future then we have to train them differently than we were trained. I really liked his presentation and I would recommend reading his book. I did take a selfie with him, but it was on the fly for a scavenger hunt (which I'll talk about later) and so it didn't turn out so great so I shall not be posting it again.

My next session was with Sandra Menxueiro @menxueiro who is the Lead Learner (or principal in layman's terms) at Dogan Elementary. Her session was about Twitter, which I promise I will write a post about eventually, it's on my to do list! I loved her enthusiasm. She's the new Lead Learner at Dogan and it's her job to turn around the school this year. One of the changes she's implemented is having all staff use Twitter. She was very honest with us and she told us about the resistance that she's had with some of her teachers, and how she's powering through with them. One of the things she said that stuck with me is that Twitter is a fire hose, and it really is. There is so much information out there on Twitter that you can get lost for days just trying to find something specific. Which is why she stressed the importance of using hashtags (which I'll get into at a later date). But I have to give a shout out to #DoganNation

Session 3 I found a little group talking about ways to use technology to communicate with parents. Now this really appealed to me, because I hate calling parents. I have no shame in saying that. Also I feel bad because there is a large percentage of my parents who don't speak English, and I hate having to ask the ladies in the front office to translate a phone call for me because they have other things they could be doing. SOOO the lady (who's name I should have written down but I did not :/) talked about Remind (which is also on my to do list) and Seesaw (which I have already written about!). Most people know about Remind, but I didn't know that they have a translate feature, which I'm really excited about! I'm definitely going to be getting parents to sign up for my new Remind class at Open House this week! An update to my Seesaw post is that they have a parent connect feature that allows parents to see their child's work which can also allow you to communicate with parents, so another plus for Seesaw!

I know I haven't talked about it yet, but Aldine has started to put in Promethean Boards in their classrooms. My school is already set up and ready to go. I've played around with mine a little, but one of the sessions was about the basics of how to use the board, so I made sure I got there! The presenter (who I can only remember his first name of Paul) was using the latest version of the software so of course he was able to do the coolest things with it, but even still there's plenty of cool things I want to share with you guys! So Promethean's software used to be Activinspire, but they have since done away with that and now they use Classflow. There are two ways to use Classflow, online or download the desktop version. I still have to play around with these two, but rest assured that they will be included in later blog posts! Oh, BTW completely free to use!!!!

Last session was kind of thrown together at the last minute because the presenter cancelled 20 minutes before the session started so the Technology Specialists from Aldine had to rush to get a session together and they really did a great job! It was a mix of Google Classroom and Schoology.  Now I've used Schoology as a 'student' because that's the site that they use for all of our online professional developments, but I've never used it as a teacher. I have no experience with Google Classroom, so I'm going to have to play around with both of these before I'm able to make a definitive statement on which one I want to use in the future (but I can tell you I'm leaning towards Schoology because they will let you integrate Google Docs into your assigned lessons).

Of course it wouldn't be a conference without the vendor floor. This year they did things a little differently. If you were able to get 10 different vendors to sign off on a special sheet that they gave you, you could earn a bonus Professional Development hour! That's right, instead of only getting 6 hours, I was able to earn 7 (1 for keynote, 5 sessions, and 1 for visiting vendors)!!!! Plus it's always fun to go and talk to the people to get your yearly supply of pens and sticky notes lol!

One thing that they did to keep the fun going in between sessions was to start a scavenger hunt. I've used a few different scavenger hunt apps, but the one that they had us use was GooseChase. I love this app! You can lock the different hunts with passwords to keep out people you don't want joining in. Instead of just having hunters go to locations and answer questions, this app lets you take pictures or videos of certain tasks that you want them to complete. You can also take those photos and videos and upload them straight to Twitter and Facebook (which I did). If you're using it as a teacher, make sure you do GooseChase EDU for better deals and pricing. I am a little sore about the results of the scavenger hunt, because I didn't win :( but there were just soooooooo many things that you had to do that were not introvert friendly! I had to go up to so many people I've never met before and get them to high five me, connect on social media, get interviewed on Aldine Broadcast, and a lot of other things. Even with all that though, it was still a great idea to incorporate into the conference.

Overall I had such a great time and I can't wait to go back next year! I highly recommend this conference to any teacher who wants to learn more about the different technologies that are available to them. Plus the $17,000 in door prizes they give away make it even better!

First Week of Year 3

Oh hey! I haven't seen you in a few months. I guess that's mostly my fault... I was supposed to be posting and reviewing some stuff, but I decided to go dark this summer. In fact I didn't even touch my laptop all summer long. I didn't go to any staff developments, which I'm sure I will regret once the school year gets on and I'll have to scramble to get the necessary hours. This summer it was just me and Netflix.

Unfortunately summer is over, and school has started again. I know that some schools don't go back until Monday, but I've already been back with students for a week now, AND WHAT A WEEK IT HAS BEEN!!

Monday was pretty good, I got to see a solar eclipse which I can now cross off my bucket list. Met most of my students and had a pretty decent day. Got to talk about summer with my students and what all they did. Did the first day of school ritual and talked about rules and expectations. 

• Oh hey, important side note, if you're going to do rules and expectations with your students I suggest you have the students come up with the rules. Now don't do the thing where they are in charge of coming up with everything, because they will take advantage of that. How I do it is I tell them I have 3 rules: Respect me as the teacher, Respect your fellow classmates, and Respect the classroom. Then instead of them coming up with rules that favor them I ask the question "What does it look like to respect me/each other/the classroom? and then turn their statements into things that they should and shouldn't do. They still technically come up with the rules, but it's all things that you're in control of. Then you need to post it somewhere in the room, and refer back to it when they need reminders. If you want to see how I did it check the link below

My Social Contract

Tuesday I started my classwork and was glad to see that students brought most of their materials and even brought their homework back from the day before. If you expect them to do homework every night you gotta start from day one. It doesn't have to be much, mine was literally one addition and one subtraction problem. AND YOU HAVE TO CHECK IT!!!! If they think you won't check it, they won't do it. Gotta set the precedent early.

Wednesday was decent. Students started to bring in their "Extra Credit Supplies". I gave them a list of things that they needed to have with them everyday: folder, journal, paper, pencil, the usual stuff. Then for extra credit they could bring in a pack of printer paper, tissues, hand sanitizer or dry erase markers. They really responded to that and I'm off to a good start so far, I don't think I'll need dry erase markers until I decide to retire at this point! The students were fine, but you could tell with the adults that something weird was going on. Living on the gulf coast for all your life you kind of get a feeling of when we're due for a storm. I made the stupid mistake of saying at the end of the school year that we hadn't had a storm since Ike in 2008 and that we'd probably get a storm this summer. Too bad Harvey didn't listen and decided to wait until school started to make an appearance.

Thursday was awash in uncertainty. Students still didn't know anything about the storm, and the unspoken rule is if they don't know DON'T TELL THEM! Was a pretty normal day, except we're all talking about the school districts around us that are cancelling school for Friday and Monday and how we're still scheduled to come in tomorrow and how we have to watch the news to find out more. Well on one of the 6 o'clock news casts they announce accidentally that Aldine ISD will be closed on Friday. The superintendent sent out an email saying to ignore the newscast and that school will occur as scheduled. Fast forward to 9:30 when they decide to actually cancel school... for the students. Teachers still have to show up to "secure materials" woohoo...

Friday morning rolls around and everyone kind of had the same idea to completely abandon the spirit dress reserved for Fridays. I personally decided to rebel (LOL) by wearing flip flops which is considered a big no-no . But hey it was special circumstances and thankfully no one was going to enforce the dress code. We had to unplug all electronics and get everything up off the floor in case of flooding, which took all of 30 minutes for the whole school to do. We were supposed to be there until noon, but our administrators graciously let us go at 9:30. Quick shout out to my classroom neighbor who undoubtedly had the worst first week, because as she was getting ready for a hurricane, she also had to wait to see if her son's wedding was going to be canceled/rescheduled because they decided on a beach wedding in the path of the storm :(

Currently I'm just chilling in my pjs on a Saturday night waiting to hear if I have to get up for school on Monday or not. Either way I think I'm gonna be just fine.