Friday, July 24, 2009

Never Stop Learning

Wow! I still can't believe that it's almost time to start the school year. I had a busy summer. My husband is getting ready to start his first year teaching this year. He's been attending classes and doing a lot of preparation work. I've been helping him, but he has been very good about wanting to learn how to do things on his own. What I've been surprised about is how much his classes have helped me. When he would come home and discuss what happened in his classes, it would often cause me to re-think some things about my teaching practice.

His insight as a beginning teacher is so refreshing for me. I didn't realize how many of my thoughts about teaching were sort of "knee-jerk." For example, he said in his syllabus, he was going to allow students to re-do assignments as many times as they wanted to get a higher grade if they were willing to come in after school on his designated "re-do days." He said it really didn't matter to him if it took a student, say, three times to "get" something, as long as they got it before the end of the grading period. He said that sometimes the light bulb doesn't come on for some students until half-way through or almost the whole-way through a unit. What a revelation! How did I miss that? I know it won't apply to every assignment or situation, but what a basic way to offer "differentiated instruction."

Although this summer has been exhausting, I am thrilled about what I learned. Even more so, I am excited about what I might learn as the year progresses and my husband and I share our teaching experiences over the dinner table. Collaboration and idea-sharing are so key to becoming a better teacher. I feel so blessed to be able to do that at home now too.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Great website builder

If you are looking for a way to build a website for your class, you may want to consider using www.weebly.com. I have spent probably the equivalent of 2 days (over several weeks) putting together my website, and it has been virtually effortless. Weebly has drag and drop features that make building the website easy.

One of the great features on Weebly is its built-in blog pages. I plan to use these blogs for daily updates on what was covered in class. Therefore, when a student is absent, he/she can go to the website to learn what was done even before they come back to class. I will also use a blog page with my advanced class so that we can have a discussion board.

If you are interested in looking at my website, please go to www.bized.weebly.com. It is still a work in progress, but I am pretty proud of what I have so far.