THERE IS NOTHING WRONG HERE

I went to the Christa McAuliffe Tech Conference yesterday for the first time. I usually go to the MassCUE tech conference, but I was in NM at the time. Will Richardson was the keynote and I have to admit I am a bit of a groupie. I don’t know where he gets the energy, traveling from workshop to conference must be tiring. With each workshop I have with Will I come away with a deeper connection with technology and education.

The ETLO workshops will be over soon and the real work of signing up and training other teachers will start. As I was communicating through the wiki with other members of the MA team I felt I was working on an island and wanted more personal connection with other edtech teachers. maybe we can get together this summer for a technology “camp” and emerse ourselves in tool and content. I feel like I am always wanting more time to sit and really work through ideas/connections/tools/curriculum so that it becomes second nature. That is the problem with the Edtech conferences, I get an hour with Will, he touches on a few basic concepts and I have a few notes with ideas, the next time I get real time to set with the ideas and tools may be a month later.

At least it is grist for the blog.

may all being find peace

Sandia Mts. from Rio Grande River

Visited my family in New Mexico two weeks ago (parents and 4 brothers). I was able to record my mom and dad as they told stories about growing up in the ‘20 and 30’s. New Mexico was still the wild west then. I hope to edit and then post some of their stories on this blog, they will enjoy it.

Albuquerque keeps growing and is becoming a mini-LA. Neither Nena or I want to move back there, we enjoy New England too much, give me a blizzard any day over a forest fire and drought.

I tried to contact the edtech teacher at my old high school, Manzano, but he never returned my call or email. They have a connection to a super computer at Los Alamos and it would be fun to see what they are doing with technology.

I successfully completed a Skype video connection with my classroom in MA from NM. The ease of setting up Skype and the webcam is scary. Now the hard part, how to use this technology in the curriculum. A place to start would be to connect classroom within the Collab.

As we work on curriculum development we can identify teachers who have a “best practice” lesson already developed. As we all know , especially in SPED, trying to be an expert in all the curriculum areas is impossible. With Web 2.0 tools we can teach to our strengths and share them with students not in our classroom.

I started this blog post a month ago so I want to finish it and start blogging regularly again. 

The days fly by when 43 high school students come and go through your classroom in a day. At the middle school the regular ed teachers would congratulate me on my ability to work with 8 difficult students. I have always admired teachers who can work with a 100 students a day.

I was able to get rid of the desks in my room and replace them with tables. What a radical idea. The desks were these large metal and plastic traps that gave the room a somber feeling. They were not inviting at all.

The most challenging aspect so far has been to try and meet the individual needs of all the students. Alison, Melinda and I re-shuffled the students into more homogeneous groups and that has made it a little easier. I also decided that most of the students need to develop their basic math skills before moving on. There is a basic math textbook in the classroom, but there are only 10, and it does not include enough repetition for real learning to take place. I have a math series that breaks down basic skills and has plenty of practice. Most of the class has moved through division and is now working on fractions, a few students are still learning their multiplication facts. Three students are “testing out” and moving onto algebra.

Keep moving forward.