Danielle Terry's Blog

This week, I decided to go to my second blog choice for the semester as "Cult of Pedagogy" took a break for the week.  I will be summarizing Scott McLeod's most recent blog on challenge- based leadership.  This blog post really made me sit back and think about the different ways that my school challenges students and sparks their curiosity. The blog began by a quote from Sir Ken Robinson, "Young children have a ready appetite to explore whatever draws their interest.  When their curiosity is engaged, they will learn for themselves, from each other, and from any source they can lay their hands on."  This quote really stood out to me and made me reflect upon the eagerness that students have to learn something new and how our job as educators is to ensure that we are consistently keeping that curiosity and eagerness alive.  It really made me think, "Do I keep this alive in my students each day?" which is exactly where Scott went next.  Scott then q...

My district is currently moving toward all schools using MAP as a way to assess student growth throughout each school year and to compare student growth across several school years.  This week my students completed the winter MAP assessment.  I have always thought it is a great use of technology that each student is able to be assessed on the iPad, while completing questions at their independent learning level so that we can determine the grade level that they are currently working within.  However, my goal clarity coach was able to show me a couple of tools using MAP's online system that really changed my classroom. 1) Re-forming Small Groups: Using MAP's online data on each student, I was able to see both the grade level and percentile that each student is working within, therefore I easily identified my Tier 3 students.  I also noticed that two of my students moved from Tier 3 to now being Tier 2 students, which was very exciting to see the growth! I was also a...

This week Jennifer Gonzalez blogged about "Moving from Feedback to Feedforward."  This blog post was one that was very insightful to me as I am constantly looking to strengthen the feedback that I provide to my students. Jennifer touched on how much feedback impacts schools and how sometimes a school can be seen as one long day of feedback.  She really highlighted how feedback can be more hurtful than helpful in the way it is often received. For this blog post, Jennifer interviewed Joe Hirsch on the concept of Feedforward.  A quote that really stood out to me and made me understand the importance of Feedforward was, "When we give feedback to our students, or when our co-workers or administrators give feedback to us, the focus is on the past. People can’t control what they can’t change, and we can’t change the past,' says Hirsch. 'And that happens to be the focus of most of the feedback that we give or receive.”  I found this very interesting and insightful as I...

I have always been an avid user of ClassDojo in my classroom for behavior management, but this week I decided to step out of my comfort zone and try to start incorporating the new toolkit that many teachers had been telling me about.  I cannot believe I haven't tried it before, it was so easy and my students loved it! I'll highlight my favorite aspects of the toolkit below. Group Maker: The group maker was one that my students were really excited about.  I often group students for discussion or to work on a small activity together and my students often get tired of working with the people that they sit next to.  With group maker, I was able to quickly tell ClassDojo how many students I wanted in each group and it formed small groups for me to display.  I used it several times in the past week and it was a great way to mix students up.  This probably would not be best if grouping students strategically, but it does work to get students mixed up and talking. D...

This past week Jennifer Gonzalez created a blog post that could not have come at a better time for me.  She posted about the "6 Ed Tech Tools to Try in 2018." 1) Flipgrid : flipgrid.com Flipgrid allows teachers to post a question for students to answer.  The students make videos of their responses and then can collaborate with other students through commenting on one another's videos. 2)  Insert Learning: insertlearning.com Insert Learning allows you to find any information on the web that you would like your students to participate with for a lesson.  Jennifer provided the example of using an article published online for your students to read and adding your own touch to it through questions, etc.  Your students responses are then sent to you.  I cannot wait to try this one! 3) Book Creator: bookcreator.com This allows students to create their own books and publish them online. 4) Newseumed: newseumed.org Newseumed is a news museum that...

This week presented the perfect opportunity to use technology in a new and engaging way for my students.  My students needed to review for the District Common Assessment for math.  I had recently heard about NearPod and decided to try it with my students for review.  While I do not have an entire class set of iPads, I was able to put students in small groups for this activity and give each group an iPad.  The students were then able to review math questions using NearPod and I was able to see each small group's real time response as well as discuss any misconceptions that I saw in student work. The students loved when I was able to display their work on the SmartBoard after they solved a free response question and they engaged in great conversation if we needed to clear a misconception based on a group's work.  This idea came to me the day before reviewing, therefore in the future I plan to know well in advance that I would like to use NearPod to allow my studen...