How to: Pull a CAASPP Accommodations Query from SEIS

For my department and perhaps others who need to prepare and verify student accommodations for state CAASPP testing I have recorded here a procedure to setup a query from the Special Education Information System (SEIS) that will give all the information needed.  Once you have set up this query, you can save it for next year.

Here goes:

• Step 1: Search -- After logging in to SEIS, find the "search for students" link on the left side-bar of your home screen (see below right). Click that link and you come to a new screen asking for "Search Filter" and "Columns to Show".  
• Search Filter allows you to select only the names you want, which could be useful if you wanted only the 12th graders graduating or only the 11th graders potentially moving to a Transition program, etc.

This could be useful.

• Step 2: Filter -- For today's CAASPP data, I put the first filter to "Case Manager" is like "Andrew Hyland" by clicking the drop down menu and scrolling down to case manager (Marked "1" and "2" in the picture below left).  
• Nearly every box on the IEP is listed in the drop down box in alphabetical order, so the first time you create a query there will be a lot of scrolling (don't use your touch-pad chromebook unless you have to!). 
• Step 3: More Filter -- Another filter I used for this was to click the "Not" box and select "grade level" and use Shift+click to select all the grade levels 9 and below (Marked "3" in the picture below).
• This was because CAASPP is done by credits, so we need to include 10th, 11th, and 12th graders from the SEIS list just incase their credits put them eligible for SBAC or the 10th grade Science test. (It's doubtful to me that 9th graders would be credit-eligible for the 10th grade Science, but it could happen.)

• Step 4: Columns -- Anyway, now the filter is set.  Next, select what information you want to pull from SEIS.  Each drop box in the "Columns to Show" section (marked "4" above) will be a column in the report you create.  I scrolled through and picked the information I needed for CAASPP, shown below right. To add columns, simply click the green plus sign (marked "5" above).

• Quite a bit of scrolling through options, but we only have to do it once.  The order of your choices from top to bottom ends up being the order of your data columns from left to right.  So, be careful to put things in the order you want.
• Step 5: Save and Print -- Click "Search" at the bottom of the page and you get to the results page which previews the students and data columns you've selected.  From here you can name the query and save it as marked in the picture below. Then select print.
• You are almost done, but I'll mention that there are some powerful options on this page. You can print only a sub-set if you don't need every name in the data (check the boxes next to the names you want to print and save some paper!) 

• Step 6: Group and Sort -- After saving the query for next time and clicking print, the next screen asks you how you want to group and sort the data on the printed page.  For this situation, I told it to group by grade level and did not sort.  
• If the admin. pull a large amount of data, they could group by case manager and then sort by grade level.  Or, you could sort by participation in CAASPP and it would place the kids who have accommodations on top of the list for you (otherwise it's just an alphabetical list).

• Step 7: Print -- Just like you do for SEIS, click print and wait for the pdf to load.  Print as usual.  Repeat for next year.

Enjoy, I hope this helps and came in time for this year's testing.

VPEF Grant Thank Yous from My Class

Typing our essays on student desktop,
Chromebook, and hand written.

Earlier this school year, I applied for and was granted some generous funds for my classroom.  We were able to acquire two more Chromebook laptops to bring my class's grand total of available student computers up to seven (or sometimes eight or nine depending on the old ones working properly that day!).  In all, we have five Chromebooks now and those are nice for the students to use due to their speed and since my district set me up with google Classroom this semester.  So overall, this grant has had a large impact on my classes.

Working on a Slide Presentation for
Speaking and Listening Standards

I asked my students to write thank you notes to the Vacaville Public Education Foundation which granted the funds.  It was not lost on them what kind of impact these added computers had for our class and I'm sharing a

Part of our class writing essays.

handful of their notes here. Here's one below, and links to some more from the class.


Here are some of the projects we worked on using these computers this year:

• A class Padlet page "Where I'm From" poem.
• A Slide  presentation for Speaking and Listening skills.
• Some shared brainstorming ideas, in preparation for our essays--here's one:

Starting my first google Classrooms.

For the writing assignments, I was able to use google Classroom thanks to +Dawn Marsh at the district office who set up my classes as part of the pilot this semester!

Sci Fi book choices for 12th grade

About a year ago, I sent a request out for some Sci Fi books for 12th graders to read as part of their unit in short stories.  Here's a link to that post on a different blog which is worth taking a look at just for the few titles I collected in the comments. I've copied the post below:

J’s 12th grade co-teach class is going to do a unit on science fiction short stories and wanted a list of a few good ones. So I’m posting here to get some titles.
I suggested Arthur C. Clarke’s Nine Billion Names of God and Asimov’s Nightfall. I also gave some authors: Zelasny, Heinlein, L. Niven, a couple others.
Nightfall is hardly short at 300+ pages but it fits the genre in other ways.
Any other suggestions from folks?

It's that time of year again, so I've got a couple of students asking me for more suggestions. I emailed this same list to them and I'll again ask for suggestions this year so I can have a wider list every time I send it out.

Any more suggestions?  -- I guess it doesn't have to be a short story, but that is the unit even though the focus for their assignment is on the Sci Fi part, not necessarily the short story part.

Shut off Spell Checker in Docs

This I just found and it might be useful in two or three applications: You can shut off the spell checker in Google Docs. Most people are smarter than I am, and so probably already knew that.  Here's the quote from the help page: 

Spelling suggestions as you typeAs you type, Docs automatically underlines in misspelled words in red. Right-click an underlined word to see the suggested correction and replace the misspelled word.You can turn off the spell-checker by unchecking Show spelling suggestions from the Viewdrop-down menu

Click here for the full page.

There are two times I can use this:
1) During an everyday type activity when I want students to focus on composing volumes rather than editing and fretting over perfection.
2) During California Exit Exam proctoring when a very few number of my students have "use of a word processor with the spell checker turned off" written in as an accommodation during the testing.  Then I can have them sign in to a convenient Chromebook without disrupting the other testers or having to arrange a second adult proctor to escort them to a separate place with a clunky desktop that may or may not work, or possibly has an older version of Word etc. etc.

I hope this is useful for others too.

#FallCUE Day 1 Report

On the first day of #FallCUE this is what we learned:
American Canyon had insufficient bandwidth for the number of educators and their devices on campus this morning.  By the afternoon, most problems were corrected--either people had logged off or connected to their phone's hot spot. (note: this was fixed by Saturday, I never found out what the issue was)
Past that glitch in the beginning, there was much to learn.  We went to 5 sessions and burned our brains out on google forms, scripts like form Ranger, green screen videos in the classroom, using add-ons to give students feedback on their writing, building my class website and embedding videos in google forms.

I loaded up on plenty of apps, twitter people to follow, and the real winner of the day was the number of new methods for giving feedback on student writing.
I found out that google classroom is only for schools with GAFE so it's not even worth looking at until I convince someone at my school to advocate the powers that be for that situation.

Session 1 was a run down on automating your work flow with formRanger and formMule scripts (scripts by Andrew Stillman) presented by @John_Eick. Here's a link to his resources which included a step-by-step screen shot of how to set up your documents and sheets.  Very useful for a teacher who is new to this type of thing.  This was the session where the wifi was the worst and got better at every session following this.  John was a really energetic presenter and even I, a relative expert on Stillman's old scripts, learned a few tricks to use in practice.

For session 2 and following, +Peter Hyland  and I split up to hit more sessions and because he had different goals for the PD since his classroom situation with technology is vastly different than mine.  I went to John Eick's next session on embedding videos in google forms and Peter went to the Hour of Awesome.
Embedding videos looks like a sweet way to have students take notes while watching a short video, then the teacher is able to quickly look at the notes and give some feedback on the quality of notes, etc. etc.  There are about 3 uses I thought of in my classroom and the only limitation would be technology access.  Could address that by "flipping" the model" and having those that are able do the video notes at home and others do it in class.  That method would require some planning for the kids not actively taking notes in the classroom.
Peter said the Hour of Awesome was awesome and his notes make it sound exciting. Ask me for the link and I'll share the notes with you.  It covered multiple Google products and a few of the case uses for each that could speed up repetitive teacher tasks and improve the speed of student feedback.

The theme of Day 1 was faster feedback to students.  The teacher has to do a little more time consuming prep and setup on the front end, however it's worth it so kids get a faster and better idea of how they're doing with anything from writing to math to biology notes.  Session 3 with +Kristina Mattis (@KristinaMattis)for me covered some add-ons in google docs that allowed collaboration, composition, editing, and publishing of student work with more modes than just text.  Session 4 with +Cate Tolnai (@CateTolnai) showed me some template examples of how to organize my course content around my class website.  This will be most useful to me this year and next.  Finally, I visited the green screen session and got another round of figuring out how to make some videos and--even more importantly--how to use this type of project in my classes to meet standards.

Overall, an awesome day for information.  The spotty wifi and long lunch line were not enough to dampen the good things soaking in to my brain.
More reports later.

Case Management Documentation and GAS Part 4

I'm writing this down so I can remember why I did things the way I did when I have to go back and either fix it or make a new one somewhere else:

"The less change the better" is a simple motto for some folks. I wanted to keep the new method (my form) of getting Gen Ed feedback as similar as possible to the old method, so I kept the same wording and the same order of questions.  I simply lifted them on to a google form which will plop the answers down in a sheet that autocrat turns into a nice PDF that looks identical to the version we use now.  The output keeping the same look is only important to me so that the admin and district people who are used to seeing our forms can feel comfortable.  More important is that the "front end"--where the Gen Ed teachers look at it--looks as similar as possible.

Here's where my problem arises: I have to add some pre-filled, superfluous "questions" to the form so that autocrat will spit out the the PDFs exactly how I want them while keeping the formatting customized to each student.  Information such as student initials and case manager emails are easy for a spreadsheet to look up and calculate, however, this behind the scenes look up has to happen before the form submits to autocrat (without reworking my entire concept and workflow here).  So I will make it part of my case-manager-side script, but that means that I have about 4 extra questions hanging off the end of my Gen Ed form.

Perhaps I can find a way to make them invisible in the future, or end up reworking the entire work flow.  For now, better to make a working product before getting ahead of myself.

That's all for now.
Links:
Link to part 1
Link to previous part
Link to next part

Case Management Documentation and Google Apps Scripts (Add-ons)

Well I've begun the project for this year and I expect to be done around January 2015, although tht may be wishful thinking. If I keep the current pace for progressing through each problem, I'll be done by thanksgiving, so January seems more realistic.

I have previously built each of the pieces I'm going to need for this project, now I have to connect them all and make them talk with each other. I've been able to find some great examples of code, but for all of them I've needed to tweak to make it fit my data. 

My concept is for a special education case manager to input only four pieces of info for an IEP and have my program do the rest of the job looking up things and inviting teachers. This means making at least two databases talk to each other and probably three. For right now I'm pulling the data once a semester and using that to work with. So if something changes for a student then I have to update manually on my sheet. 

The old method is for case managers to look up a students schedule and then manually input each of six teachers names and classes twice--once for the meeting invite and once for the feedback form.  This method was varying degrees of technology away from a typing pool secretary with 5-sheet NCR paper and a highlighter. Currently we've moved up to around 1998 using a word document with fillable boxes. 

So far I've figured out how to make the computer read the form input from the case manager and pull up the next form and pre-fill the answers. Next is to make it email the URL of the prefilled form to the six correct teachers. 

This will certainly be part one of my posts on this topic.  Next Post Here
Link to part 3 -- and Link to part 3.5

Donor's Choose Project for Mr. Hyland's Class -- Update!

Exciting Opportunity! 

My Donor's Choose project, Classroom Computers for Common Core Language Arts, is eligible for a three-day-only offer from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. To celebrate teachers and the amazing work we do, nearly all projects will be half-off through August 24.


Please donate if you are able, or share with people you know who might be interested in supporting my class and our students:

• The half-off match will last for three days, starting August 22 and ending August 24 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time. To receive funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, other donors must complete 50% of your project funding during that time.
  
• Funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation isn't guaranteed.Funds will only be applied to your project if other donors complete the rest before the offer ends on August 24.

Here is a short link (also above) to my project page http://goo.gl/2hfQWo

Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Docs

I continually have to look these up, so I'm holding the link here on this site.
I find the help button in Docs does not have all the shortcuts I'm looking for, most notably the "insert comment" shortcut key which is "command+option+m".   Less clicking when I get my students using Docs for their writing. :)

This will become important if I ever get my next task off the ground: daily warm ups using Google Docs which should get some form of feedback (i.e. comments) from me (perhaps on a weekly basis. . .).

Link to the shortcuts

Sorry, no pics for this one.

Donor's Choose Project -- 3 new chromebooks

Well, in all my free time I've created a Donor's Choose project to augment the technology in my classroom.  My students really need to be able to create, compose, and publish on the internet.  I would like to have a class blog for some of our literature responses and argumentative assignments next year and my students this year (2013-2014) wanted to as well.

Our hold up was, well it was mostly due to planning time on my part since it was my first year at this school.  I'd like to blame the equipment, but that's not the full picture.  We could have done most of what I want to do--writing, drafting, collaborative revision, commenting, etc.--with my current technology setup; however, it would have been slow to say the least.

We currently have 3 classroom computers to use, a fourth one if I can free up a shared laptop for the day.  Even with my reduced class sizes I had 12 students in my largest classes and that would still take 4 rotations to get all the students on to computers for typing.  While that's ok for shorter writing assignments or surveys (see my previous post, the data for which I gathered using two of our computers hot-seat style after exams), it is tedious for research papers or longer assignments when the needs of my students require that some of them are typing for two or three times as long as other students.

Donor's Choose only lets you start out with a small project at first until you get enough "points" to allow a larger dollar amount for your projects.  This, I assume, weeds out the weaker hearts, and indeed kept me out last year when I created the account and drafted half a similar project for my last classroom. Even with this small number of points--and therefore a small "budget"--I am able to fund a huge boost in capacity for my classroom:  Three Chrome book laptops for my room will double the available number of screens for students to use and cut in half the time it takes for computer projects in the room.  Not to mention the classroom management impact!  Easier planning for me, I hope.

Upon the successful funding of this project, I believe I will be able easily to plan and implement some engaging and fun lessons with our new English curriculum which will cover Antigone and Things Fall Apart next year.  Look for a class blog on here and, at the very least, some published student examples of peer edited and revised, polished, college prep writing.

Here's the link to my teacher page on Donor's Choose:  Link
Yes, it's the same as above--I'm trying the best I can since the project expires in 4 months.

Class Feedback Results

To follow Larry Ferlazzo's example, I'm posting my class feedback results from my end of year suvey. I'll put the questions followed by the highest percentage rating, just to save typing since I don't want to take the time to screen shot the charts and graphs that google forms made for me.

 I didn't split these by class period or anything, although I think for next year I'll take the trouble to make a different form for separate classes to get a better idea. This will be really important for me next year since I'll be co-teaching with two different teachers and teaching 4 different subjects. I'm excited for the challenge.

• I felt challenged by this class: 41% neutral
• I felt like Mr. Hyland respected me: 46% agree
• I felt like Mr. Hyland gave me useful feedback: 70% agree
• I felt like Mr. Hyland was fair: 63% agree
• Mr. Hyland had high expectations of me: 50% agree
• I tried my hardest to do my best in class: 37% each (tie) strongly agree and agree
• My grades reflected the quality of my work: 52% agree
• Mr. Hyland encouraged me to do my best: 43% agree
• I felt safe in Mr. Hyland's class: 54% agree
• The class was well organized: 59% agree
• I enjoyed being in this class: 41% agree
• I always followed Mr. Hyland's instructions: 41% neutral

 I also had 5 short answer questions where students could type a response. Some did not, and others made what seemed like sarcastic comments (hard to tell if they were serious). However, there are some gold nuggets that told me what I needed to hear from students (that's the point after all!). Many of these comments referred to our penultimate activity--watching Star Wars after a series of lessons on the Hero's Journey, so if you follow the link below and scan those comments, you'll note some fanboys.

 I also co-teach one period, so I included my co-teacher and co-teach class on the questionnaire. You'll see her name in there as well. Here's the link to my full results, and--as un-scientific as they are--I'm proud of them this year. I always have plenty of room to improve. My goals for next year include inching forward on tech integration in my classroom lessons.

Hero's Journey Lessons Reflection, Pt. 1

It's no secret to my students that I enjoy Star Wars in almost every way.  I'm surprised these last few years at how many students have not seen the original episodes.  This year, the majority of my 3rd period English 11 P class had not seen any versions of Star Wars--which surprises me since Episode III came out in 2005 (and the Clone Wars cartoon just barely ended!)

My third period co-teacher (@jenilola)originally came up with the idea to do a Star Wars week of mini-lessons to cover the Hero's Journey--mostly since so many had not seen the movies.  She had some Hero's Journey lessons archived and we pulled those out to dust off for the end of May.  I immediately decided to steal the lessons we crafted for my other 10th grade classes.

Long story short, we ended up not having the time in the year to do Star Wars or Hero's Journey in 3rd period, and lucky for me, I've squeezed it in for my other classes.  Due to some last minute training days that will keep me out of the classroom for three straight days, I had to split up the Hero's Journey mini-lessons and it only seemed natural to split them into Act I, Act II, and Act III of the quest.

On day 1, I showed a very brief power point slide show (thanks to mythologyteacher.com [I only showed Act I up to the threshold, so as to not get ahead of myself!]) of the different scenes in Lion King that correspond to the "Departure" portion of the Hero's Journey up to the first threshold.  I then passed out index cards with stories and movies where I knew the plots (and hoped the students would know at least one! -- turns out none of the 10th graders have seen Planes. ..).  I randomly passed out cards, but let them swap until they had one they knew well.  For three absent students, I later gave them the entire stack and let them pick the one they knew best, so we had some duplicates but that's ok.  The students spent about 10 minutes filling out a chart with the generic steps of Act I "Departure" with the corresponding parts of their selected plot line.

This is where the magic happened; since, when the students could not remember a part of their plot, they had some serious questions for their classmates.  "What was the 'talisman' for Po in Kung Fu Panda?" "It was the Dragon Scroll, duh!" "Wait, why?"  This followed by an explanation (with no help from me in most cases) as to why the object in question fit the archetype it was supposed to fill.

We also heard some discussion as to why Twilight did not fit so easily into this structure.  For a few extra credit points, I assigned the kids who wanted a challenge to complete Finding Nemo with the dad as the hero and one to work with Nemo as the hero.  Another student chose to do Star Wars Episode IV with C3PO as the hero (real fun and much challenge since his quest has a short cycle within Luke's hour-long departure sequence).

Despite me delivering a canned power point lecture for the first 7 minutes of class and then immediately passing out a fill-in-the-box worksheet, students had some higher level thinking and two-way conversations about their hero characters.  Of course, because we had to split the days of May up between other curriculum, we only talked about Act I and the departure of the hero, so there was not much discussion about how characters changed and why they had to take certain actions or make certain choices.

If these weren't mini lessons, I would next want to have them produce one high-quality poster (gotta love posters, plus I need something on my walls for back to school night next Fall!) for 2 or 3 of the key steps--perhaps one showing all the "guardians of the thresholds" from all the 12 different films and stories they broke apart.

Did I mention that I moved all the desks around in my room? Mostly to get them off the walls so that students could then post their Hero Journey plot points around the room.  Sadly, we ran out of time (mini lessons, a blessing and curse!) before I could have students present their Act I lists or gallery walk the room and discuss.  Never fear, however, since the desks ended up in a large circle and we had plenty of top-quality discussion before the sticky notes finally went up.

More thoughts on automation

As I sat in the allergy office and watched the nurse enter data into my record, I immediately realized another use for autocrat in my daily work. Any time a task is repeated in the same way, I should be able to get a machine to do it. The trick is getting the information into a format the machine can use and then into a format the humans can make sense of. I might have solved half of those problems while waiting for the doctor to come.

In my job we give formal academic testing to each student every third year. There are a number of different sub-tests and even different main tests that the district likes to use. All of the tests and scoring programs I've used will spit out an electronic report in either (or both) a Word document or a rich text file (that's the .rtf extension).  I need to learn how to get a machine to parse through the text file, convert the standard scores from tab delimited text into spreadsheet data, and then run an autocrat-style mail-merge into the generic report template.  The spreadsheet could also talk to a student data information system (info dumped from SEIS?) and use the student's unique ID number to look up gender and then put in the correct gender pronoun in the tedious parts of the report--replacing the "his" for "her" is always difficult or at least time consuming.

I would leave the summary and recommendations up to the report writer, so the final document that the computer spits out cannot yet be a pdf.  Autocrat can handle that, however.

I think this would be a highly useful tool for case managers who are interested.  One benefit is that not everyone has to use this system if they don't want to.  Also, it should be quick and easy (relatively) to set up and get working now that I know a little of what I'm doing with the scripts.  The first step might be the hardest for me--making the computer parse a text document and convert.

This little project will be on the back burner until around March 2014, I think, due to some meetings coming up . . .

Streamline the Paperwork to Save the Sanity of the Case Manager

My department chair asked a while ago for info on data collection using google forms.  I presume she has gotten pretty far in the process and that the data has started pouring in since the question today was how to display the results.  I have put up some screen shots below of how and where to click to get the automatic version of data summary that google provides for free.  Anything much beyond that will require a little more spreadsheet wizardry.  I'm getting out my robe and wizard hat now.

First, I'll show you how to create a form and then it will make more sense how to get information out of the response spreadsheet.

First, in your Drive account, click on "Create" and then "Form":

Simple enough.  Google will ask you to title the form and then you can create some questions.  There are some awesome tutorial videos on how best to use each type of google form question. +Melissa Hero has some good ideas if none spring to mind. (But then, if you had no ideas for how to apply these tools, you wouldn't be looking around for tutorials.)

Next, put in your questions.  You can also add in data validation, and many other neat tricks, no computer programming class required.

You can make questions that work from check boxes or drop down menus or radio buttons or large text boxes and many other types (e.g. date and/or time; although, the date and time questions display all funky when you pull them out of spreadsheets since it's stored as a time code of some sort so computers will read all the way down to the millisecond).

Google will automatically create a spreadsheet to collect all the responses.  Each column header is named for a question you created.  The far left column will always be a timestamp when the "submit" button was clicked.  This is useful as a paper trail.  I also learned a little trick to add a unique ID down one column.
The formula is this:
=arrayformula(Row(B:B))

I use the B column since Google steals the A column for the timestamp and the left hand column is the normal spot for a Key ID in (for example) a database.  With the arrayformula down the whole column, I can later look up any row of response data I want.  It's very neat.

Back to the summary of data!
You can get to the summary from the responses spreadsheet by clicking on Form menu and then Show Summary of Responses.

Alternatively, you can get to the summaries from the form itself (in edit mode, not the live form that users see) by clicking on Responses, then Summary of responses.








I put in some fake sample data:

Here is what the responses look like for my fake data:

That was cool.  I hope that helped and was actually what I was asked for.

Now for some real wizardry.  We have the technology, we can rebuild him, stronger, faster than before!
Using two google forms (one for Special Ed case managers and one for Gen Ed teachers to post feedback), we can replace the current paper system of giving and receiving IEP feedback.  That's not accurate, all mine are electronic right now.  I'm just using MS Office docs with forms to fill out which is only cumbersome when new versions of the software comes out and half the staff can not upgrade (public school budgets, etc.).

With a different revision of the current feedback system, I would insert a link into my MS Outlook calendar invites that go out to Gen Ed teachers. Here is the link to the sample email headed to Gen Ed teachers to invite them to the meeting.  Please make comments on it. Remember, this email is automatically generated and filled with the correct meeting info etc., so I don't have to write 26 individual invites for my individual students times 6 teachers each.  Microsoft allows you to do the same thing.  There are a number of advantages to google so the department could debate which they'd like to use.  I'm honestly ok with either as long as the whole department is doing the same thing.  I love uniformity, I think it makes us look professional to parents and teachers and I think the Gen Ed staff appreciates when we have our systems in place smoothly.  (Our current system is really good at VHS, I want to shed as much paper as possible and the little timestamp feature when Gen Ed teachers click submit is a nice perk!)

After teachers get that email, they click the link to the feedback form that would create the final pdf attached to the IEP in the computer.  Here's a sample feedback form.

There are many other uses for this type of functionality in a school system.

Thankful for a Great Day

I had a great day teaching last week and I have to share it.  This was one of those days when the students start off not getting it and each attempt you make falls flat on the floor two feet in front of you.

This is not the whole context, though.  I did have a pretty successful day for my first two classes with few interruptions, some learning, but little to write home about either.  My co-teach class is always more lively and fun--I'm trying to steal some ideas, I swear! But what made it a great teaching day was my 6th period Algebra 1 class.  Usually a challenging time for students to learn Algebra.
This day last week, my lesson presentation was falling pretty flat.  At one point, I reversed direction and taught a completely opposite method to solve the same type of problems and two of my students light bulbs went on.  They got excited and rushed through the rest of the classwork I had posted on the board.
It was a good feeling and one of the main reasons I love teaching.

Another Round of Room Preparations

More Cleanup

We went in to campus again on Friday to push around the furniture and finish cleaning the messy spots.  By lunch time, I had room 105 looking good enough to hold a class in--although I'd like to do some more work on the walls.  We could at least walk in tomorrow and start a class without too much distraction, which is a huge improvement to where I left it last time.  I also brought in my drill and moved some of the pegboards from wall to wall in order to make more space for a larger white board.  After lunch I went to the local hardware store and picked up an 8' by 4' piece of thin plywood to turn into a whiteboard extension.  I just can't work with that small white board up front--I need more space to work problems and have students work, etc.  We ordered some rolls of the whiteboard paper to stick to the plywood and then mount on the front wall.  It may look slightly "low-cost" but it will at least allow me to post up the required things like objectives and standards.  Then I can use the "real" whiteboard for student work and examples everyday.

The pegboards still need paper and boarders.  That's on order and should arrive Monday.  We'll have an orange and black theme in the room.  I hope the students don't get too bored of seeing every teacher post the orange and black colors all over.

The next task on my list is to really get down to the details on my 12 Angry Men project idea.  I'm going to create a couple just to see where the potential snags are.  Of course, I don't want to take away too much of the fun from the students creating this project themselves.  No spoilers here, I'm going to keep this project a secret for a little while longer so I won't go into any details on it in this post.

Blog Focus

Speaking of this (and previous) blog posts, once school starts I want to use this blog primarily for student work so I'm looking at other teacher's sites and blogs to get some direction on this.  For now, however, you will see posts about the classroom and other posts focused on me.  This is not because I want to be stuck on myself--I do want to get into the habit of posting on a regular basis, so if there is no student work then I will post just to keep the habit up.  Also, if there is no student work, you should contact me and bug me about when I'm going to give the students their assignment for the blog. 

Setting up the Room!

This is a room in progress:

East Wall

Here are some pics of what the room looked like in mid-build.  I went in to campus yesterday to clean a little and move the furniture around so it looked more like a classroom.  As you can see, it still has a long way to go.  It could use some additions to the walls, although I've made the desks look a lot nicer than these pictures show.  Also, I could use some butcher paper on the pegboards.  Following this time-consuming work, I need to go get the pacing guides and curriculum maps for English 10 and Algebra 1.  Hope to see some eager faces on August 15th!  

West Wall

We have a small space and I hope that the way I moved the bookshelves and cabinet around from the last teacher will open up the space, because I really don't like cramped rooms!

North Wall

This setup will be cozy, but there's a lot to work with and I've been promised a few student computers along the side there (West Wall).
I can't wait to get some bulletin boards up and start planning some lessons.
I'm really looking forward to this new year.