Mo Physics Mo Problems

“How do you react when your students don’t grasp a concept or skill the first time you teach it?” Bell, Kasey. Shake Up Learning: Practical Ideas to Move Learning from Static to Dynamic (Kindle Location 780). Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.. Kindle Edition. If you listen to the talk in educational chats today, you will hear phrases like “fail forward” and “FAIL = First Attempt In Learning”. The general idea is that we don’t expect success the first time we try something. So, we shouldn’t expect students to master a concept or skill the first time they try it. Teachers and students need to be ok with this fact. There is a lot of debate in my school around applying this idea to summative assessments, not just formative. I have a very strong opinion on this topic, but this is not the post for that. (But, I imagine you may already know where I stand on telling a student it’s time to stop learning.)   For the sake of this post, let’s look at pre-summative assessment learnin...

As I looked at the reflection questions in Kasey Bell’s new book Shake Up Learning , I began thinking wouldn’t it be interesting to see what my students have to say about some of them.  The specific questions that led to this thought were the following: What opportunities has technology brought to your classroom? What problems or barriers keep you from using technology effectively? Bell, Kasey. Shake Up Learning: Practical Ideas to Move Learning from Static to Dynamic (Kindle Locations 653-654). Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.. Kindle Edition. I was really curious what my students thoughts were.  So, I put them in a end of unit feedback survey. I slightly rephrased them to be a bit more specific to our classroom, but they were essentially the same question. For a little background on the state of technology in our school. Our students are 1:1 with Chromebooks and we have public wifi network, private wifi network, and a specific chromebook network. Before the Ch...

A reflection question in Kasey Bell’s new book Shake Up Learning asks, How has technology changed your personal life? Professional life? Bell, Kasey. Shake Up Learning: Practical Ideas to Move Learning from Static to Dynamic (Kindle Locations 462-463). Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.. Kindle Edition. When I think about all of the different tech tools I have used in the classroom, there are quite a few. I would say that the greatest tools for students to wield are tools for creations. From my perspective, though, my greatest technology tools to help students learn are ones that allow them to experience phenomena. This could be through videos or simulations. They have revolutionized the ability to explore by seeing and doing. The one tool that has found a place in both my classroom and my home lives is YouTube. I know it may be super obvious, but the more I think about it, the more amazing YouTube is. I have lived through the age of films, filmstrips, video tapes, a...

"We all watch the pendulum swing back and forth when it comes to pedagogy and best practices in instruction and assessment." Bell, Kasey. Shake Up Learning: Practical Ideas to Move Learning from Static to Dynamic (Kindle Locations 366-368). Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.. Kindle Edition. In her new book Shake Up Learning , Kasey Bell asks readers to reflect on their career and react to the pendulum of pedagogy. Specifically, she asks how we have reacted to these changes. I’d like to look specifically at how technology has changed my what I do in the classroom. There are some basic science skills that we expect students to become proficient at.  These have recently been formalized as a part of the Next Generation Science Standards . These practices include ones that are highly related to technology in the classroom such as Developing and Using Models Planning and Carrying Out Investigations Using Mathematical and Computational Thinking Constructing E...

Personal events this week have forced me to ignore any prompts and go from the heart. Fourteen years ago we brought home a 12 week old puppy. We named her Georgia (after the song but there is a constant battle over which version is better Willie Nelson or Ray Charles) and have cared for her ever since. This past weekend, our poochie passed unexpectedly. To say it has thrown me out of sorts would be an understatement. But, like usual my work carries me through. My affection for Georgia has been one of the strongest insights students get about me as a person. When they make their passion pages in their portfolio on day 1, they see Georgia at the very top on my passion page template. She is also the lock screen on the iPad students use to log into resource block. And she’s the wallpaper on the laptop I use in class. So even though I don’t spend much time in class talking about my dog, students have picked up on how big a part of my life she is. It’s amazing how many st...

In modern PD, we spend a lot of time discussing the why of adopting new practices. But this week in IMMOOC , we are focusing on the how.  Specifically, the prompt I’m focusing on is, “How do you create more opportunities to connect and provide effective feedback to support those you serve?” I’d like to focus this post on the #1 tool I use in class for feedback, Pear Deck . Pear Deck is a great tool for students to interact with a presentation. It allows for collecting student thinking to drive instruction and creating opportunities for student reflection during instruction. Students can interact via any web enabled device from a laptop to a smartphone. It is a gigantic leap over clickers and tools like poll anywhere because of the interactions it allows learners to have and the forms of feedback that can be collected. With the recent addition of the Pear Deck add-on for Google Slides, I think it’s a great time to share more information about, how it can be used. Pear ...