Summer Inspirations: Week 2

I still have 10 work days left and today we actually had school cancelled because it is going to approach 100. New England is crazy! For those of you already on vacation, here are some inspirational people, accounts, and books to follow!

@gafe4littles

Tech Educator Podcast

Cult of Pedagogy

Learn Like a Pirate

Summer Inspirations Round Up - Click here to see all the current Summer Inspiration Weeks

Summer Inspirations: Week 1

Hey all!  I promised and my challenge to myself is to keep this up all summer long!  These books, accounts, and blogs can inspire you to kick it up a notch in your classroom next year... by the way, did I mention I'm not done till June 29th?!?! 9 snow days don't seem so fun now!!! 

If you have any suggestions for this Summer Inspiration list, enter it in the Form at the bottom of the post (You do not need to fill out the whole thing... just the stuff you want to suggest!)

Ron Clark Academy

@mrmatera #XPlap

Google Teacher Tribe Podcast

Ditch That Textbook

Hope and Wade King

Teach Like a Pirate

Summer Inspirations Round Up - Click here to see all the current Summer Inspiration Weeks

It's the most wonderful time every four years!!! ~ Election Resources Video 1

It is Christmas for social studies teachers..... the presidential election!  This is my absolute favorite topic to teach and my favorite time to teach it!  This year's election is interesting, to say the least but I have found a ton of great resources to use in my classroom.  I'm going to be making a couple of videos to find some of the resources I will be using and I'll also provide some free products to use in conjunction.
My first video is on the website fivethirtyeight.com.  I help you navigate the website and see how it would be useful in a classroom.

If you are interested in some paid resources, head on over to my Teachers Pay Teachers store and check out these two resources:

  

Stay tuned for some free resources to use with the 538 website!!!

EdCamp Granite State....so worth it!

Today I attended my first EdCamp and it was soooooo worth it. I sat in a great work session on iPad apps, had a really fun experience in a "Things that Suck" session and met some amazing colleagues who will definitely be my new BFFs on Twitter.

Probably the coolest thing for me was taking the plunge and presenting during the first session. Since I got such great feedback here, I decided to talk to everyone about creating their own opportunities for professional development. The middle school kid in me had an inner dialogue going on about nobody showing up but I decided it was worth risk.

Check out my pink sticky!

I decided to use this blog post as a guide so I could also show off my cool blogging and design skills (dork alert!). What ensued was a great conversation! People were really interested in Twitter so we started with that and probably could have done a full hour or more on just that. I showed them the other resources in the post and then others joined in the conversation and showed some more amazing ideas for PD.

Edmodo

Classroom 2.0

And EdWeb

I have used Edmodo and Classroom 2.0 but EdWeb is new to me so I am psyched to play with a new resource!

I loved how organically the conversation moved from there and I just adored how jazzed people were getting to both share and take. I was able to have some great conversations and meet some amazing people. I can't wait for the next EdCamp! So .... Have you been able to attend an EdCamp yet? Was yours as successful as mine? Let me know!!!!

 

Posted with Blogsy

Fine.... I'll Make My Own Professional Development!

Being in education as long as I have I know that one of the biggest complaints is professional development opportunities. As a social studies teacher I have had to sit through hours of district wide professional development and none of it was geared for the social studies specifically. Don't get me wrong, I have learned invaluable tools from workshops on behavior management, dealing with difficult parents and writing across the curriculum but sometimes I would love to listen to someone talk about teaching social studies. We do have state social studies conferences but with shrinking budgets we can't afford to send nine social studies teachers and provided them with substitutes. I have started sending my people in pairs and rotating by grade but this means that a whopping two people get to see best practices in action.

 Next year, I think I'm going to present at our local conference just so I can get free admission. It is never below me to sell my wares for a free seat. This dilemma has always sent me outside of my district walls to become better at my profession. I do believe that although it is the job of my district to train me in the things it wants me to focus on and implement, ultimately I am the one who chose this profession and I should be willing to do the work to remain at the top of my game. Luckily, we are living in an age where professional development is at our finger tips and creating a professional learning network goes beyond your town, your state and your region. Although I focused on social studies here, most of this list can easily be tailored to every subject.

 So.... How have I created my own professional development opportunities?

 1. Twitter.....

 I know a lot of you already use Twitter for professional development but I am writing this post for the newbie. Twitter isn't just all about reading about what people ate for lunch (you can actually really learn more about people's lunch choices on Instagram:) ). I am on Twitter solely for education (except for following my boys from Supernatural.... Sorry, guilty pleasures). First, there are some amazing people to follow on Twitter like Richard Byrne (@rmbyrne) and Tony Baldasaro (@baldy7) Just reading their Tweets can offer you PD for a week. Once you get deeper into Twitter, you use the hashtags (#) to follow conversations. I am a big fan of #sschat and #edchat. As a social studies teacher, if you go to Twitter on Monday nights at 7pm and follow #sschat you will take part in a conversation that usually revolves around topics like getting rid of textbooks or how to use primary sources in your classroom. Checking in on your Twitter feed can easily stretch to an hour. Cybraryman, an amazing education resource on the web, offers this immense list of education hashtags to follow so other subjects rejoice!!!

 2. The Teaching Channel

 OMG!!! If you have visited my blog before you might have seen the professional development videos I curated for my department and if you looked at them at all you would have seen 95% of the videos came from the Teaching Channel. They are just amazing. It is more than just a bunch of "experts" telling me how to do something. These videos are of real teachers implementing real best practices into their classrooms. I can't even tell you the amount of ideas I have gotten from this website and I looooove their focus on the Common Core. It is still such a vague idea, especially for my subject, I love being able to see teachers succeeding at implementing in their classrooms. I really love how they offer something for everyone.

 3. Teacher Cast

 I have never really understood the point of podcasting until I found the wealth of educational podcasts. My favorite has to be Teacher Cast. They host podcasts just under an hour that focus on current topics in education and they recently just did an awesome chat on primary sources in the classroom. The best thing about the podcasts is the versatility of listening. You can find these podcasts in iTunes so I downloaded them to my phone and listen to them in the car. Even if you don't have a smartphone, though, you can listen straight from your computer. I listened to the primary source on while I was setting up my classroom in the morning and then finished it while I wrote a teacher observation.

Some other podcasts I follow are:
 Bam! Radio - I love these because they last less than fifteen minutes and are packed with information.

 Teacher's Aid

 4. ITunes U

 Now, if you don't have and iPhone or iPad you can't do this one.... Sorry to be a techno snob. On ITunesU you can download "courses". That are published by universities and websites. Once you download them they get stored in your library.

 My absolute favorite course is for Edutopia. They have organized all their amazing videos by topic.

 Most of the videos are less than 15 minutes so I love watching one before I go to bed at night.

 I'm not sure how your district allows you to track and submit PD but here in NH we are totally about local control. We have our immediate supervisor sign off on our portfolios and then the district gives the nod to the state. I have begun to write up all the time I spend on these activities to document them for PD hours. I use Google Drive to document the pod casts, links and dates. I can then submit this to my superior for PD hours.


I won't lie, I have done a lot of work to organize all this. It is my passion so I enjoy doing it but my digital scrap booking and cleaning my house has taken a hit for this passion. The best thing, though, is after I hear a wonderful podcast or find some amazing resource on Twitter, it puts a little spring back in my step and for a fleeting moment I gain back that feeling I had my first year teaching, I become optimistic and hopeful again, and to be honest, that feeling is addicting. I don't mind working hard to feel that over and over.

 Lastly ... I'm really excited because others feel the professional development void and created EdCamp and in three weeks I am going to one in New Hampshire. Yeah for teachers being resourceful!

Tweet

Edcanvas, PD and the Common Core

First off, I need to send a shout out to the snow gods because I got my snow day.  It was a day later than expected, but I got it and it was major.  We got about a foot of snow.

 It was actually pretty productive as well.  I played with the kiddos, corrected some projects, did some planning, made pizza with the midgets and then in kicked the ADD, but it was a good kick.
Myself and a team of my colleagues attended a Common Core workshop the other day that was supposed to help the non math and ELA teacher navigate how and when to incorporate the CCSS in their classrooms. The workshop was .........eeeehhhhh.  I've been really studying the CCSS for a couple years now and she really didn't teach me anything I didn't know.  I'm not saying that from a place of I know a lot, either.  Everyone at the table felt the same way.  On top of teaching three fabulous 8th grade social studies classes, I am also the department chair for social studies at the middle school and I'm really try to bring the CCSS to my department with ease to initiate understanding.  It is not easy because there doesn't seem to be any real answers out there. In my internet travels, I'm finding that social studies teachers are struggling on what their new role really is.  I don't have any amazing and fabulous answers for my department, yet, but I decided to give them more resources.  I got my weekly email from the fabulous people at the Teaching Channel and my mind started to spin.  Our district is looking for people to propose ideas for outside of school hours professional development.  I decided I wanted to make a PD video list that lasted about one hour and focused solely on the Common Core State Standards and social studies.  I was going to do it on Google Drive but decided to use a new tool I had signed up for instead.  In walks Edcanvas!  Edcanvas allows you to curate connected content, videos, images, websites, Google Documents, etc.and place them onto one page for easy access.  One of the best things about Edcanvas is you can create a class and monitor who is logging in to work and how long they are spending on each activity.  I decided to give it a roll:

I organized everything and added minutes onto the lengths of videos so people could plan and spread out their viewing.  I emailed this to my Assistant Superintendent and she gave me a thumbs up and told me she can't wait to watch the videos.  For the teachers to get their PD hours, I'm creating a learning log on Google Drive and I have set up a class called Professional Development so they can chart their activity.
This is what it looks like for the teacher:

So far, I'm loving Edcanvas!!!  Here is what mine looks like:

 And here is access (you can embed it in a website):


Click here to access the canvas if you are having difficulty viewing it above.

If you are a social studies teacher, or simply a middle school teacher, feel free to browse my canvas above.  I found some great videos on activities and ideas that are pretty amazing. I'm already making a new canvas.....Professional Development Part II: Return of the Common Core!   If you have any great resources, share as well.