Use the comment field below to share your stories about learning during the FedEx Faculty Forum time.
Have a group representative post a short summary of who you worked with and what you accomplished below so we can ALL learn from your time together.
New Westminster Mac Users 
In our workshop this morning, we worked on creating a series of “Warmup” Questions for my 7th grade history class. I worked with our learning team, Kevin and Grace O’Gara and the three of us set up the forms on Google Docs to create these warmup questions. I hope that I will use this feature at the start of each class… the cool thing about it, if and when it works, is that I will be able to see the answers of all 15 kids at the same time on a spreadsheet. That will help me determine who needs help, who can help others, what concepts need a little bit more discussion, etc. My whole new Google Sites website, entitled “History Cats” should be pretty fun to use all year long. My thanks to the site’s lead architect and designer, Kevin O’Gara, and his assistant, Grace O’Gara.
I love this. How lucky to work with the kids (and these kiddos!) during FF. I kept thinking how much easier a time I’d have if I had my students around to help me navigate.
1st Grade Teachers, Shoie McCarthy, Mya King, Debbie Creel, and Maury Hitchcock are discussing the advantages of using Google Page Creator to create a classroom website with more to offer than our school web pages. Any thoughts on whether this is a good path to pursue? Seems like it could be a great communication tool, and one that would be user-friendly to both teachers and parents.
Let us know if you come to any conclusions… Christy and have been toying around with the same ideas… that or blogspot or a facebook page. Unsure.
Ivy
Elementary P.E. Teachers, Bill Mosley, Kahlil Boyette and Sharon Lynn Throckmorton are discussing some various ideas for assessing our students this year. These ideas included portfolio sheets, FLIP camera assessments and peer check-off list. We are also in the process of organizing “folders” for each trimester that include all our assessments, check-off sheets, class notes, etc. We are on a mission and excited about our year!!
Joseph Koch, Tray Malloy, Chip Myrick, Gerry Romberg, Andy Dunn, & Kevin Horne are using Fed Ex time to discuss integrating Moodle with Hudl software technology. Discussion has focused on the benefits an open-sourced web application, multi-media applications in and out of the classroom, time management & efficiency, and potential growth with 1:1 laptop program in 2012/2013.
Hello,
Jenny Heidt, Nancy Beane, Wade Boggs, and Rick Byrd worked together on RSS feeds using Netvibes to create a front page for our internet connection. Faculty and students can use Netvibes to stay abreast of essential reading from commercial publications, organizations, and blogs by having them feed onto one centralized, and customized page. Our session also helped people work on some Mac keyboard and navigation skills.
VENERE TECHNOLOGY with JOHN BURK. During our FedEx time, we played with the motion detectors and temperature probes. We also spent time looking at the Logger Pro application and lessons by Venere to support instruction. Hoping to no longer use alcohol thermometers!
Thanks Mecia for stopping by. I’ve got a bunch of probes that can measure everything from temperature to UV spectra in my classroom for the next 30 days. If you’re curious as to how you might use your computer to measure respiration, your heartbeat, or any of a dozen other things, and how you might turn that into a very interesting lab or activity, just send me an email and we can set up a time to meet.
Davenport/Benedict presented conversation about formative assessment. A quick review of formative assessment included the four characteristics: focus, collaboration, ongoing, and immediate. Various methods were shared; then we learned how to use Question Press. This is a website where students can type any question (as formative or summative assessment) and view the results. The second half of our session was devoted to creating personal documents for classroom use. The results can be used in many ways (spreadsheet, graded, etc). Attendees were: Peggy Jagger, Scott Snyder, Becky Doster, Tom Ryan, Sarah Emily Peterson, Maggie Blake, Beth Plunkett, Jill Allen, Akwetee Watkins, and Virginia Gillbert.
6th grade English team: (Judy, Jan, Chuck, Valerie, Carter) met to talk about first semester plans for the course, specifically to help Valerie with essential learnings and 1st semester schedule. We talked about fun first day activities, summer reading, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, and short stories/writing.
The AP Spanish Language teachers (Agnes Matheson, Sofia Walcott, and Anna Major) met to discuss ideas for ensuring we have some established norms for common assessment of our students’ work. We specifically focused on the first few written and oral assessments that we will conduct in class to help us ensure that all of the students have been appropriately placed in the correct class. To help us determine the appropriate level, we are following the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) guidelines established for students at this level of language study. We are also going to continue our work in an effort to simplify the College Board’s oral and writing rubrics to help students better comprehend exactly what warrants a particular score on the AP exam.
In our FedEx time, the Pre-First teachers collaborated on making our own Classroom Webpages. Kathryn Flinn guided us through a tutorial of iWeb. This will be a fabulous tool to use from the start of school next week! Each Pre-First homeroom will have similar basic facts, but we will each add our own unique spin to our site. We plan on updating the webpages regularly for our parents. We take so many pictures of our adorable students at the beginning of school and throughout the year, this will be an excellent way to constantly update the parents! Kathryn even taught us how to hyperlink! It was a great use of our time!!!
Kimberly,
iWeb is a great tool, but it is in some danger of being eliminated by apple in the very near futute. If you want to create beautiful websites with a minimum amount of hassle, I would suggest checking out google sites. Very easy to use. Here’s a good tutorial.
John,
Several classrooms in both 1st and 2nd grade (including mine!) have created websites through iWeb. I guess we had no idea that it was in danger of being eliminated. Such a shame because iWeb is much more user-friendly than Google. How should we proceed, now that we have assembled these sites?
Kimberly,
Everything is very uncertain right now. iWeb hasn’t been updated in a while, and the switch to iCloud from MobileMe are leading people are wondering what will happen to it. You can probably continue to use it so long as you aren’t uploading your side to mobileme, which is about to go away, but I don’t expect Apple to update it much in the future.
Shannon Hipp, Valerie Stevens: Met to discuss new 8th grade journalism (Writing Workshop) class. We want the entire thing really to be student-driven. First few weeks of school, students will determine what they want the paper to be. Editors will meet with 6th or 7th graders interested in writing during occasional Office Hours. We will guide students through issues such as media bias, photojournalism, censorship, print vs. online publications, etc. Students will read other papers as well as try to get their work “out there” to other places. (Columbia Scholastic Press?)
Students will work in stations on different types of writing (news, sports, editorial, reviews, creative) and assemble portfolio of their best work (published or not) in each of the 6 Traits (according to our rubric).
Diane Holcombe, Florence Sumner, and Kathy Updegrove had the opportunity to meet this morning. Florence is a substitute teacher for Christie Chalberg. Diane and I helped Florence get settled in and try to help her with school email issues. We also had a get used to our Mac session together, helping each other with tips we know and going through the posted Essential Skills list. Diane and I also brainstormed project ideas for 8th grade science.
Nurfatimah Merchant, Chris Harrow and Heather Bergstedt worked on creating mini projects for the honors precalculus course to introduce main ideas in the spirit of problem based learning and technology incorporation.
Maureen Miller, Jen Harper met to align our test questions with our learning objectives for unit 1 APES. We discussed how to use Schoology to make APES more “user friendly” for students, and set up an APES Schoology site.
Valerie Stevens, Colin Mackey: Hammered out details of new 8th grade screenwriting (Writing Workshop) course. We talked about organization, assessment, and genres. We will kick off the class with a viewing of Casablanca, widely recognized as one of the best screenplays ever written.
FedEx Session: Blogging as Digital Portfolio http://itsaboutlearning.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/fedex-session-blogging-as-digital-portfolio/
Second grade teachers, Lee Bradway, Liza Farley, Ginny Lovern, Gayle Hartness, met to design classroom web pages.
Tony Souza, Alicia Davis, and I met with PAWS parents to create a series of evening educational events for faculty and teachers on topics like drugs/alcohol, how to engage without overbooking, technology use, etc. We are excited about collaborating with the PAWS committee to work on issues that are so important in the lives of our high school students. Keep your eye out for our series of speakers / panels this year!!!
Had a great partnership in learning (J. Dracos-Tice, V. Norman, K. Solomon, F. Finsthwait, N. Beane, L. Krueger, and Stan Moor, who proudly sent his first blog comment! Years ago, Stan and I exchanged our very first professional emails). We talked about WELL-INFORMED critical thinking and practiced scholarly process toward achieving deep focus on a complex topic, using both collaborative learning and online research to expand and enrich understanding. Vicki created a website, introducing new databases and updated research tools. Very organic and dynamic, provoking lots of great questions, thanks to our wonderful colleagues. Learning together begets new and better questions on both content and the ways to enhance the learning process. So we beat on…
Thursday: The JHS writing workshop team gathered to discuss the beauties of our new courses and the consistencies we will be keeping with the 6 plus 1 Writing Rubric and our new AUDIENCES! Then Clark Meyer and I began to hash out Essential learnings and guiding questions for the Environmental Writing Class. Go team.
Friday session 1: Ross Peters, Jack Morgan, Jim Justice and I met to discuss the 6 plus 1 rubric as a tool for creating more vertical alignment between the 8th and 9th grade English classes. We are looking for a common language to help our students write (and read!). More meetings/discussions on this to follow with 8th and 9th grade teachers during some of the Tuesday A time coming up (right Bart?).
Friday session 2: Russell Wrenn (one of our new rockstars) and I led a class on Formative Assessment and Standards Based Grading. See the lesson here: http://superfluousthought.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/formative-assessment-and-sbg-faculty-forum-class/
Ryan Sample and I worked on our plans for the new PLCs in the English department. Back in June we met with Leslie Ann Little to get some insight and instruction then today discussed our plans for our groups (there will be two in the high school). We both attended the workshop on Google Docs yesterday and talked today about how to make use of it in our PLCs. After our work today, we came away with plans for our first several weeks for the groups.
Marta Miller, Maria Russell, Sofia Walcott, and Anna Major met today to work on some curriculum changes that will affect the honors/AP Spanish track. The changes have been made to align more with the structure of the newly updated AP Spanish Literature exam, which will be focusing more on making connections between literary works, art, sociocultural and political movements, and the larger world in which we live today.
Thad Persons, Sabrina Waldron, Jere Wells and I led a session dedicated to the development of PBL projects across all disciplines. We worked to define PBL and also shared some of our own PBL projects. Christy Ostrowski, Jack Morgan Stan Moor, Marta Miller, Anthea Economy, Tim McCauley, George Berry et al worked in teams to create and plans for their own PBL projects.
Brooks and I facilitated a workshop on Google Docs. Our “flops” were willing participants who engaged in lots of creative thinking around using Google Docs in the classroom. We brainstormed and shared, and then we broke into groups to discuss how to use Google Forms and Diigo. We loved being able to not just listen and learn but think and create.
For those who want more information…
Here’s the doc that George tweeted out
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HuoHaQ5VtIawN4izeaOlHOmZaBk08wQ3gYhfJq1rJW8/edit?hl=en_US
And here’s the doc Brooks made with instructions for using Google Docs. (It’s a Google Doc about Google Docs!)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12QYYgSK7qYCOK9WPNk0iccvr7Dxe8EV0DVPGiZfxFb4/edit?hl=en_US
Anne-Sophie Hankla and I met to brainstorm and plan for out French V curriculum this fall. We used google docs to share ideas and lessons, and narrowed down and prioritized the topics. Anne-Sophie then created an on-line survey to ask students for feedback and to prioritize their interests. We plan to use google docs to co-plan our course and share ideas throughout the school year. It was great to have this time to work together on our shared curriculum.
6th grade Science team (Brenda Cobler and Alison George) worked on creating a podcast to introduce the safety rules to our students. We created a project in which the students will create their own podcasts in class that demonstrate an assigned safety rule to the rest of the class.
We also worked on developing the new 6th grade science curriculum: Our Changing Climate in which we will be implementing a year long project where the students will be investigating the climate all over the world and how the world is changing due to climate change.
Robin-Lynn Clemmons, Ellen Vesey, Sandi Penn, and I met on Friday to talk about our Honors Geometry classes. We put our heads together and discussed the curriculum as well as collaborating with and providing support for physics. I feel like we made good progress and implemented some excellent, positive changes to improve student learning. Our discussions will continue this week, and I would like to bring up ideas about a few student geometry projects that develop problem-solving skills.
Saffiq, I’d love to talk to you and your colleagues about some collaboration b/t geometry and physics, I’m sure the other physics teachers in my department will be interested in discussing these ideas as well.