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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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InstructureCon 2016 Volume 3: Return to Camp Canvas

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I've made my way through 70 sessions that were posted on YouTube from InstructureCon 2016.  Now, I didn't watch them all in totality. Certain sessions were focused on administration of a Canvas instance and as a classroom teacher, this is something that I don't have to deal with.

There are a lot of great videos from the Con in which you can hear the stories of districts implementing and growing their implementation of Canvas. But I'd like to focus on a couple that I found extremely informative from the perspective of a classroom teacher.

Join the LTI Camp
Christy Steffen Noblesville Schools
This is a great session for people who don't know what LTI tools are or who are already using them in their Canvas course. If you haven't investigated LTI before, this will give you a great place to start. If you're an LTI guru, you're bound to find something new.




Using Canvas and Blogs for Student Publishing and Reflecting
Terence Priester Newington College
This session does a great job of framing how teachers can utilize blogs as a reflection tool in their classroom. The presenter does a great job explaining the why behind student blogging. But, he also shares a blogging course he has created in Canvas Commons for any teacher to get students started blogging.



Hacking Canvas: Making the Rubric Tool Work for you
April Lynn Millet & Stevie Rocco Pennsylvania State University
I am all about innovating my use of rubrics in Canvas. So, I loved this session. The presenters do a great job of walking through the different types of rubrics and how one can build them in Canvas. They also include best practices for rubric design. I had so many takeaways from this one. They also shared out their slideshow.




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