Suzanne Whitlow-ITRT

Maggie Hos-McGrane is a veteran teacher with lots of international teaching experience. I read her blog all of the time, she is one of the people in my google reader where I spend all of my spare time catching up with the great things people are doing in education.

This post really caught my eye for a couple of reasons.  First, she admits that some of the things she has done in her classroom needed to be examined.  “ After doing the Harvard Project Zero summer school over 10 years ago I went back to work and ditched about 70% of the tasks I’d been doing up till then, having looked at these tasks in a new light and found that they were engaging, perhaps, but in fact not really worth doing as they weren’t contributing to the learning, didn’t involve much creativity or critical thinking and didn’t have much connection with what the students were interested in learning. “  This is what I also try to do as an ITRT  in every classroom that I visit.  I just want people to examine what they are doing, and critically think if it is worth the time and effort.

Secondly, she talks about choices that students get to make in their own learning.  Please check out this fabulous article, and thank you Maggie for giving me permission to share your blog.

Necessity is the mother of invention for sure. While working with a grade 5 class and trying to go through some anchor papers to instruct students on why writing samples are scored the way they are; I got the idea that I could use google docs for this. I created a short writing sample (taken from an anchor paper) in a google doc. I made the sharing permissions open to anyone with the link, but limited their involvement to comments only. I tried it first with some members of my tech team; then tried with a grade 5 group of students. They were able to see all suggestions and comments instead of just listening to someone talk about how they could change it. For some reason, this was engaging to these students. I had them highlight a word or phrase, then from the menu Insert > comment.
The students suggested punctuation, replacements for overused words, subject/verb agreement and many things they often miss in their own writing.  I’ll be expanding this for next week, but had great success today!!  If you want to see a sample, contact me and I’ll give you the one my team practiced on.

The graphics and videos used by NASA DLN are unbelievable.  Our students got to hear, see, and speak with NASA today about the moon, the planets, and how the probes are giving us information.  The students are blogging about it here:  http://blogs.henrico.k12.va.us/pagross/sample-page/question-1/  There are two other pages of questions as well.

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