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Thank You for 20 Years.

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After 20 years of teaching at Brookfield Central, I am saying goodbye. Although I spent the majority of that time in the physics classroom alongside my learners. That changed for my last 18 weeks. I ended up in a place similar to where I started, teaching chemistry and biology. So, rather than dealing with juniors and seniors at the end of their high school careers, I was in classrooms with freshmen and sophomores still trying to find their place. At the same time, I was learning and teaching a set curriculum I hadn't taught in over a decade. So, we were learning. But, of course, I already knew the content.  The point of this post is to take a step back, take in, and share the gratitude from the last students I had in my 20 years at Brookfield Central High School through the cards and notes they made for me on my last day with them.  I don't take many yay me moments. But after 20 years, I think I'll soak this one in.
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What I learned at Camp

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Today I am attending EdCamp Milwaukee.  EdCamp is an unconference where educators pitch ideas for sessions the morning of and attendees go to sessions of choice and "vote with their feet"

This is my 3rd year attending edCamp MKE.  It is hosted by Tammy Lind, Chad Kafka, and Beth Lisowski.

1st session I was in dealt with Standards based grading. My biggest takeaways were

What grade is a 3? Should it be an A? Sorry, I can't get away from grades.  We're not there yet.

Why as a teacher should I be defining what "exceeds" mastery looks like?  Shouldn't students show me what it looks like for them to exceed?  I'm going to be scratching my rubric for our next summative assessment based on this concept.

Can I create skills rubrics that might have long term measurement while having content rubrics that have short term measurement?

If we're going to do this, it has to be clear to both teacher, parents, and students what all these numbers and standards mean.

(While I was in this session, I was live streaming a session about Twitter via a Google doc and learned about TweetDeck for laptop.  Game changer!)

2nd session I attended was about using technology to streamline communication.


The big takeaway from this is trying to find the best way to communicate with different groups might be different.

I learned about Voxer which looks like a fantastic app.  Look forward to playing with it later.

I also learned that chromebooks have the Remind app.  We're going 1:1 with Chromebooks over the next couple of years.  This will create a quick way to communicate to all students instantaneously. Without cell phones or the need to email.

At lunch, there was a great gadget presentation.

Chemistry 4D is a fantastic augmented reality app that allows one to see elements up close and to perform actual chemical reactions!!

Catch box is a soft and safe mic to pass around at meetings or in the classroom.

Finally, what I want is myo with this you can use gestures to control your device from a distance.

3rd session I attended was focused around maker spaces.


To be honest, I have no idea what a makerspace would look like in my class. Now I've seen how it can truly free up my students to choose their mode of learning from digital media down to hands on construction to demonstrate content mastery.

I am very excited to research products like LittleBits to help students build and redesign as they learn content and skills.

Finally, I went to a session on text coding with iPads.

You'll have to forgive me becasue I'm running out of steam.

Here's a link to their great presentation.




Not done yet.

At the closing, I got to play with Makey Makey thanks to Tricia A Louis.



Best EdCamp yet!

See you next year.

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