MSA

This time of year everyone in the state of Maryland (who is also in the field of education) has one thing on their mind MSA.  The state test is a big deal this year for my school seeing as last year was the first time we had made AYP in four year. 
This year which changes being made to No Child Left Behind AYP is measured differently then in the past; this is both good and bad for my school.  On the good side we do not have to continue to have a specific number of child go up we just have to say the same or improve.  The downside is that the math curriculum has changed for the county.  Six grade math (both standard and advanced) no longer has any geometry standards in it.  This means that all of our sixth graders eaither have to remember the geometry from 5th grade (which they don't) or they get them all wrong; this is not good for our numbers for AYP.    

Blogging with Science

Anyone have any ideas about how I could use blogging in my science class. I currently use it with assignments for students to complete, but I want them to be writing their opinions but my topics right now are the layers of the Earth, Plate Tectonics, and Continental Drift Theory. Any suggestions??

Respect

Random thought for the day.  How do you teach a student what Respect looks like?? And not just respect for learning, but how they talk to others and how they talk to an adult?  I know you have to shoow respect before someone will give it to you, and you have to teach respect before you will get any.  But how can you show and teach a child how to be respectful when they come from a home where there is no respect. How do you teach a child that there are rules at home that are different from school rules, and that school expects more from you then people at home?

Cell Phones in the Classroom

     This week part of the reading was looking at Wikis, RSS, Social Web, Flickr, and Video Media.  With all of the new technology in the world the one piece of technology that Richardson does not talk about is the cell phone.  This week as a grade level team my co-workers and I had talked about the number of cell phones that have been going off in class; thus the number of cell phones we have taking.

     The flip side is in a way we are telling our students to use cell phones.  As a 6th grade team six out of eleven of us use Edmondo with our students.  One of the things we tell our students is to download the Edmondo app to their cell phones and/or iPads.  The twist is that we are still yelling at students when they use the Edmondo app to complete an assignment while they are still in school.    

    Friday I was talking with the sixth grade administrator.  We are both just waiting  to the time when students are allowed to use their cell phones in school.  This not only opens the door to using  more apps in school, but using Social Media Web and other Web 2.0 medias. 

Blogging with my students

I teach 6th grade science.  The county that I teach in loves for us to use technology but the hops you have to jump thought to be able to use the technology makes it very hard.  Once taking a on-line class and getting parent permission you can use ONE blogging site with students.  I have recently just started using the site this year with my students.  Right now I have one assignment that students completed on-line, and  I am currently adding a discussion question or two for students to respond to.  However first I have to discuss with students (again) that the class blog is not a Facebook or Twitter account.   

Setting Up My Blog

For someone who considers themselves to be pretty tech savvy setting up this blog was not easy (mostly because I made it more complicated then it needed to be). I already have a g-mail account but not a blogger account and that button to create an account I over looked about 3 times. I am hoping that I will remember the username and password since as I said I have created several accounts and not sure which one is this one.

As I said I consider myself to be pretty tech savvy, I am hoping that like most technology sites I use I can teach myself by simply playing around with the site itself.