Poetry - can it be relevant and exciting?

As teachers in the classroom, and library media specialists, it is important to remember what an impact there is seeing poetry instead of just reading it. I love listening to Maya Angelou when she recites her own works, and I still remember these two scenes from Anne of Green Gables, and can eve recite some of the lines, all because I saw it instead of just read it. I just wanted to share them with my fellow bloggers, teachers, librarians, etc...what do you think about teaching poetry, how do you make it more relevant, or at least exciting? Signing off!

Poll Everywhere

Get a free sms student response system at Poll Everywhere

Clusty Cloud

Loading Yippy Cloud ...

Podcasting on Collaboration

Hello everyone!

Well, I am posting my first podcast, perhaps after this endeavor I will continue to make them, I'm sure I could find many uses for this type of technology. Enjoy by clicking the title. It will take you to where my podcast is hosted! Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

Collaboration is Key

Collaboration with Librarians

As a Librarian, one of the top jobs is to collaborate with teachers. This is also one of the most daunting tasks because many teachers don’t understand collaboration, or don’t believe in it. Often times, collaboration is thought to be the teacher telling the librarian what they want to teach, and the librarian designing and teaching the lesson. It is a rest time for the teacher, but that is not true collaboration. Let us investigate what true collaboration looks like, as well as the advantages and obstacles it brings.

In Shayne Russell’s article, Teachers and Librarians: Collaborative Relationships, he defines collaboration as a shared vision based on shared goals, and with a climate of trust and respect. Russell further states that each partner fulfills a carefully defined role with comprehensive planning, a requirement, that extends over a period of time (2002). Along with this definition, it is important to become aware of what each, the teacher and librarian, brings to the table (Russell, 2002).

The teacher is the one with the knowledge of his or her students, their strengths, weaknesses, attitudes, and interests, as well as what needs to be taught. The librarian is the one with extensive knowledge and skills for finding information and incorporating that into the lesson (Russell, 2002). As well, the librarian should bring the technology skills to the table, often times the library might have more technology available for use than the average classroom, and the librarian is the one trained in using all of those technologies. Overall, the librarian is there to help promote information literacy (Russell, 2002).

So, we now know what they each bring, let’s look at the actual collaboration. Saint Paul Public Schools has a lot of great information regarding the components of collaboration. Their information is mostly taken from DuFour’s article, ‘Collaboration lite’ puts student achievement on a starvation diet. Both DuFour’s article and Saint Paul’s website make a distinction between working together and ‘True Collaboration.’ Working together, or ‘Collaboration Lite’, is defined as cooperation on routine issues where the teacher participation is low-risk, short-term, and focused on efficiency for tasks and activities, and ‘True Collaboration’ is categorized by substantive conversations and work that revolves around the needs of the students and instruction practices (Components of collaboration, 2010). To look more closely at the differences between these two forms of collaboration we need to notice that ‘true collaboration’ involves honest talk, risk-taking, reflection, assessment, and results in higher achievement amongst the students (DuFour, 2003 and Components of collaboration, 2010). It is clear to see there is much good that comes from collaboration, but let us look at both the advantages, and the obstacles that make it difficult.

Russell states, in Teachers and Librarians: Collaborative Relationships, that some of the advantages of collaboration are more effective use of both resources and time, integration of educational technologies, and a reduced student/teacher ratio (2002). The disadvantages are the administrative factors, meaning if they support collaboration between teachers and librarians, because their viewpoint has a lot to do with how the staff view collaboration. Also, the administration needs to clearly and specifically define what true collaboration looks like. Another obstacle is time, if the administration doesn’t support collaboration and schedule time for it, it makes it very difficult for the staff to actually do it. As well, if the Librarian has a set schedule, and no flexible scheduling, then that too shortens the time available for planning. Lastly, the attitude of the teachers plays a large part in collaboration. It is important to sell yourself, and your skills, with the teachers, to show them what you can do to help them in order to hook them into working with you in a collaborative way, after all, research backs this up.

As a new librarian, or a seasoned librarian, you can’t expect collaboration to come easily, or without effort. It takes work to create an environment of true collaboration amongst your staff, but you can do it, just keep working towards your goal. It’s okay to start lite and then work your way to true collaboration.

Here is a video of a Teacher's viewpoint on collaboration with her Librarian.

Here is a PowerPoint to view based on the above information.

Collaboration

View more presentations from farmerdaughter.

References

DuFour, Rick. (2003). ‘Collaboration lite’ puts student achievement on a starvation diet. Journal
of Staff Development, 24(3). Retrieved from http://www.nsdc.org/news/jsd/dufour244.cfm.

Russell, S. (2002). Teachers and librarians: Collaborative relationships. Teacher Librarian, 29(5), 35. Retrieved from http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-2/librarians.html

Saint Paul Public Schools. (June 2010). Components of collaboration. Retrieved from
http://ell.spps.org/Components_of_Collaboration.html.

Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

Video courtesy of YouTube

My adventure with Jing!

Hello everyone!

Well, I'm in a summer technology course online at UHCL and I thought I would post the video I made using Jing. It was a little confusing to get started, and it took a whole lot of takes to get it right, but in the end I got it finished. Anywho, I wanted to share it with you so that you could begin to think of all the ways you could use it yourself. Since there is such a big push towards integrating technology, and most of us have websites that our students access, you could use this free application to make "How-to" videos for your students to follow. I know I have already thought of ways I could use it in my teaching. Enjoy!

Thing Twenty-Three: Done, Done, Done!

Hello fellow bloggers!!! I'm done! Can you believe we actually made it through all twenty-three things? There were many things that I liked, like the mashups, podcasts and vidcasts, and discovering Doug Valentine's cool book talks. Overall, I learned that I'm not a big fan of RSS feeds, Tags, or the Google Reader, but perhaps as I journey down the road I will become more interested in those tools. I hope you have all enjoyed this journey as much as I have, and that you have learned as much as I have. I have a much better sense of what all there is out there to use in my classroom and library, when that day comes, that is free and exciting! Adios, for now!

Thing Twenty-Two: Ning, it's not Bing

Hello fellow bloggers! Well, sadly I discovered that Ning will be focusing their efforts on their paying customers, and will no longer be offering it as a free service. Boo hoo...the Ning that most interested me was the Texas School Librarian Ning I especially liked watching the animated book talks that the students did with Doug Valentine. I investigated the "Crazy Talk" software that I believe he must have used to make the pictures animated and look like they are talking. I'm fascinated by this and desperately want the software for myself. In my Tuesday night class one of my classmates was talking about this and how she was side-tracked trying to figure out how he made these hand-drawn pictures animated like they are talking, and where do I find myself...doing the same thing, ha. As a teacher or librarian, you could use it to connect with other people in your profession, but unless you want to pay for it, you won't be able to make your own Ning network.

Thing Twenty-One: Podcasts and Vidcasts

This is a digital story I made for writing with art in the classroom. So many times students say, "I don't know what to write about!" With something like this you will hopefully inspire them with pictures. They can create a story that goes with what they see in the picture, or perhaps the mood of the picture will inspire them. Whatever it is, hoepfully by having a visual their little brains will start thinking of things to write about. I find photostory to be an easy tool to use for the classroom, and in the classroom. It is fairly easy for students to pick up this skill and as long as you do your research in advance, for pictures and information, and write your script before you begin to record, the actual making of a vidcast is pretty simple. As a mac user I was sad to see that there is not a downloadable photostory for us. We do have imovie, but the process is a little different. You will most likely have this question as some of your students will want to work on this at home, but might only have a mac, sadly you will have to tell them that it is not available...boo hoo. You might want to work a little bit in advance to come up with some direction sheets for both photostory and imovie, especially if your campus, in SBISD, has the new mac notebooks. I'm looking forward to watching the vidcasts you produced! Happy blogging! P.S. Here is something I created in a summer school course on Art in Education, this one has the voice over as well as pictures.

Thing Twenty: Embeded videos

Hello fellow bloggers! So, I searched for Librarians in Youtube and this is what I found to be the most interesting. I thought you could show this at the start of the school year when you are giving a refresher of where to find things in the library.

When searching through teachertube I found a video on how to write a persuasive essay, something my students are working on at the moment. This video uses a silly topic, "cats are better than dogs," but it makes it very simple for the students to understand. I might just post this on my website so that my students can watch it for homework when we get to writing their actual essays.
Enjoy my movies!

As teacher right now, the value of having access to all of these free video resources is that you can pull something up on a whim and show it to your students in order to enhance learning. Also, I had my students work in groups to create lesson plans and many of them found videos they could use to help teacher their lesson from these sites. As a future librarian, I could use a resource like my Dewey Decimal rap to teach my patrons how the library is set up by this system. Using something like this will help them remember as opposed to me just telling them, or giving them a labeled map, a video is more appealing to this generation of students.

P.S. Well, I was not able to embed the teachertube video because it keeps saying, "Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not closed: EMBED." I'm going try to figure it out and post it later.

Thing Nineteen: Docstoc isn't just for doctors.

Hello fellow bloggers! Well, I chose to check out docstoc, part of the reason, because I wandered if it was for doctors, or documents, ha! As I investigated I realized it is for many different areas, basically any area that would have a need for documents. Within the Education portion there are some great documents that you can download for free. Unfortunately you do have to weed through a whole lot to ultimately find the ones that are useful, but it can be worth the time. Also, you can upload your documents and make them available to other educators out there in the world beyond your classroom and school. I'm interested to find out what sites caught your attention from the Awards list. Many of the items on the list I am aware of and use due to my fabulous iphone and the many aps that are available! I had to pick something I hadn't used before.

Thing Eighteen: Open Office/Google Docs vs. Microsoft Office

Eighteen down and five more to go...for this "thing" we were supposed to explore either OpenOffice or Google Docs, or both! I chose Google Docs, simply because I was unable to download the free open office at school, it was blocked, and I do all my school work on my personal computer during my conference period, so Google Docs it is! I enjoy this free online resources because it does allow you to collaborate with a group of people without having to send things via email, and that is a huge advantage in the world of education where time is of the essence. As well, you can create things from already formatted templates rather than creating the entire thing from scratch, that is another advantage. One of the disadvantages is that there are less option as with the Microsoft Office you purchase, obviously by purchasing something it allows you more than the free versions of things, but for the most part you can do without a lot of those features. One that I might not be able to live without is "track changes" on Microsoft Office, well really on iworks, because I use that so much with my students when they turn in their papers. It give me the chance to make suggestions and comments without it being in red, or marking all over their paper. Then, they can accept it or not. Now, I'm not sure if OpenOffice has this option has I have not had the chance to play with it yet, but I will definitely look into it as an option other than purchasing the Microsoft Office package for the mac. Over and out!

I thought I woudl add two "forms" I created using Google Docs for my classes.

Thing Seventeen: Roll ups are good!

Hello fellow bloggers!

I have no experienced Rollyo and found that it could be useful as a librarian. You could create a Searchroll for the sites you most frequent and be able to easily search those sites on a daily basis without having to go to each site. I believe if I am comparingi Rollyo to Delicious, I prefer a Searchrolls to tags. I created a Books, Books, Books, search roll that allows you to simply search booklists and other review sites for books you might be interested in finding out more about before you read it, or put it in your library. Let me know what you thought about Rollyo.

Thing Sixteen: Wiki, wiki, what?!?

Hello fellow bloggers!

Here I am on Thing #16; how did I make it so far...it almost didn't hurt at all. While I love learning, sometimes it stretches you into places that are a little uncomfortable, but you make it through and come out on the other side more knowledge! I think that is where I am with tags and RSS feeds, I think. Ha! Well, wikis I can definitely handle, while I am a person who likes the bling, and wikis don't really allow for that, I can see how this would be beneficial in the world of a librarian. I can see into my future where I use wikis to collaborate with teachers from departments, for example, the sixth grade social studies team comes to me and wants to do research on Africa, that's what they were just doing, and so I create a social studies wiki where they can post the information they have and what they need from me. We can plan the entire lesson via and wiki with minimal time meeting after school. As is often the case, an entire grade-level department does not always have the same planning period, and the wiki will allow everyone to stay up-to-date regardless of ability to meet all together! How cool is that?!?! I must say that I like the notion of the "Sandbox portion" idea of designating places to play. The two wikis that were most interesting to me were the "Teacher Librarian Wiki" and the "Book Lovers Wiki" because those are two things that I have a passion for. I hope you had as much fun as I did checking out the wikis, and let me know if you start using them in your own classroom. I'm going to have to figure out how to fit this in before the end of the year. Singing off, FarmerDaughter!

Thing Fifteen: The New Library/Librarian

Well, I guess we can say the Web 2.0 is officially here and it has made it's way into the school and library, or it should have. As a school teacher I look at all of the things I do with my students online; class blog, Shelfari, Edmodo, my class website, and anything else that I can discover to make learning more fun.

When I reflect on what library 2.0 means to me I think of the students that I am serving, multi-taskers who spend more time online, with anti-social, social networking, than with print sources. Those student won't be satisfied with simply a library of print sources, they want to interact more with information, which is why it is important to be up-to-date on the latest web 2.0 tools and how they could be use to collaborate with the teachers in my school. It would look like using Shelfari to do reading logs and reading responses with the language arts teacher, teaching Edmodo to the teachers and then collaborating to teach it to the students so that paper is eliminated, trees are saved, and the students get what they want, more time learning online. It would be put technology out there for the students' easy use and being excited about showing them how to use it.

I can definitely see me talking technology instead of just book talks when classes come to the library, as well as reaching out to my teachers with ideas on collaboration that use web 2.0 tools.

That's all I can think of on this topic. I'm off to further investigate these 23 things!

Thing Fourteen: Technorati and Tags

Technorati; I just don't know what to say about it. I did not find it terribly user friendly; it took me a while to figure things out and get the RSS feed to work. For some reason the format the "Safari" gave was not compatible with the format the Technorati wanted. I finally just put in my URL for the RSS feed and they accepted that; I'm not sure how long it will take for them to actually claim my blog, but we will see. I did search, but nothing I found really jumped out at me as something I needed to follow. Am I old fashioned? I love technology, but the whole tags thing holds no interest for me. Perhaps I have a love of the hunt, finding what it is I am looking for on my own merit, rather than through tags. I have never revisited Delicious or Flickr, except for creative commons when I need a photo, and I'm not sure that I will really revisit Technorati either. The way I could see it working for a librarian is that it would allow you to claim your library blog, if you have one, as well as search other blogs for ideas from other librarians. It could give you ideas and information on collaboration and allow you to give and receive ideas and information with other librarians.

Okay, that's all I've got! I'm going to quickly move on to the next thing, and hope that it is more fun. I want to create things, not just search things.

Thing Thirteen: Is it really delicious?

Hello readers! Well, I have finally investigated Delicious. It took me a while to warm up to the site; i feel that it is the same as searching on lycos, bing, or google. The only difference is you have to save and name everything instead of just adding it to your bookmarks for further use. So, once again I get to log into yet another website to access information. I think that is the one thing I am finding daunting about this process, the amount of user names and passwords I have accrued. I'm sure that some of these sights will never be visited again by me, while others will be frequently used, I'm not sure which category Delicious falls into. Okay, stepping off my soapbox...looking at this as a potential research assistant I can see that it might be useful if you are simply working from the internet, but does it work if I am working within a database? As a graduate student that is primarily where I am going to find my research, in databases of professional journals, etc. I can see that it would be available to you anywhere for use and tagging as long as you had an internet connection, but I do have to wonder what happens if all your research is there and your internet goes down; you need to definitely back that information up somewhere else as well, I would think. As a librarian I could see me using this application as a way to accumulate information for the different core areas and to tag them accordingly. I looked for ya fiction tags and found some good sites on reading advisory. I will continue to play with it and see where I ultimately land. For now I will be Switzerland...neutral. I looked at Digg as well, and that site really seemed like a cross between an RRS feed and facebook, you know, the Live News Feed part of facebook. I don't think I will be revisiting that site, but I can see how it would be appealing to those who like to keep up with news, etc.. online. Thanks for reading, I would love to hear your comments regarding these two sites. Heading out for another adventure...signing off.

Thing Twelve: To Comment or Not to Comment...that is the question!

Hello fellow LIbrary2Play-ers, and others who might be reading this blog. Today we are inspecting the ideas of commenting on other's blogs, and what to do with your comments section. After reading the many articles on correct blog commenting techniques, two drew my attention specifically. The first, how hard is it to leave a comment? I would agree with Darren Rowse on his tenth tip, Make is Easy to Comment. I know that I often don't leave a comment if it is too difficult to get that comment up on the blog. I prefer the ones that use other sites log in information, or OpenID, over having to create a profile in order to comment. I use a blog through SBISD that allows anyone to comment by typing in the name they want to appear as and their email address. I specifically chose to go with the one through the school district because it was so easy for all of my students to comment. The second thing I found important was the discussion of keeping up with your comments section. I agree with this; do I think it is feasible to comment back to every single person, no, not always, but I do think you should pick and choose good comments and return a comment to keep the discussion going. If readers feel that you never look at their comments, then why would they continue commenting, they might even stop reading your blog all-together. Okay, I'm off to find something meaningful to say to five other Library2Play bloggers and two others that I find out on the world wide web. I'll be back to let you know what I find. Signing off....

Thing Eleven: Shelfari vs. LibraryThing...the showdown

It is funny that this "thing" happened to fall at this time because I just recently had a conversation with another teacher who uses Shelfari with her students. I have recently opened up a blog discussion with my students regarding their thoughts on taking our current reading log and moving it online. My thought is that it would create more discussion amongst all of my classes, and allow for a more authentic audience. Currently I am the only person, besides the student, that reads their reading responses. With this new format it would allow for everyone to read their writing as well as comment to each other. My students seem really excited about the idea, as am I! So, it couldn't have come at a better time that I was introduced to LibraryThing as one of my 23 things. After perusing the site, checking out all of the resources, and setting up an account, I must say that I, unfortunately, find Shelfari to be more user friendly, and visually appealing. I think it is easier to search Shelfari vs. LibraryThing. In LIbraryThing once I added a book I had to search again to get the next book in the series. That became frustrating. Overall either of these two sites would work for creating an authentic, online community where your students could discuss books together. Let me know your thoughts on the matter, do you use Shelfari, if yes, how do these two sites compare to you?

Thing Ten: Image Generators...now this is fun!

Thing Ten was just plain old fun. Someone I once knew decided that if you added "plain old fun" to anything it just made it sound more fun! I concur! This was time consuming fun; I could have spent my entire day doing this, but figured it was important to take breaks in order to teach my kiddos something, lol, kidding. Today we had library day, hero's journey presentations, and I read to them; it was an all around fun day, but I regress...back on the trail people! I could see this would be fun to show the kids; who knows, we might just have a whole day of image generators. I know we could use it to have kids create movie posters for books they are reading, or for a book talk they might create a magazine cover. I could also use it as a "Get to Know You" activity at the beginning of the year. We could do all kinds of things! I mainly used Big Huge Labs, but the other ones had fun stuff too. I've used Wordle in the past, but it seems like they have changed it slightly since I used it. You can print it, but I couldn't find anything that would allow you to save your image to your computer. The way we found that this might be interesting is to have kids paste their paper into Wordle and see which word(s) are the largest since those are the most used words. It would be a modern revision process for knowing which words you might want to look at replacing. The other sites were very similar to Big Huge Labs, except for Glogster which I did not register to use. I hope everyone else had as much fun as I did. I have attached the three things that I made, and liked, to this post. I guess I should check the instructions to make sure that I answer any questions they have given us. If I missed anything...I vill be back! Off on an adventure...check ya later, signing off!

Thing Nine: And the search continues...RSS

Okay, so I have searched through some of the links from this "thing" and I did find one blog that I was really interested in. It is called Classroom 2.0, and you have to be approved to join, but it is free and has some really great things to read about and participate in with the web 2.0 classroom. I did find an interesting blog called "The Journal" through Bloglines. It is a time consuming task for sure! Of all the search tools I found I liked Bloglines the best. No matter what you are looking for you have to either set a time limit, or have a lot of time to sit, search, and read. I didn't like google blog search, maybe because it;s Google. I'm going to think on this tonight to see if I can add anything to this blog later. Perhaps I'm just tired.

Thing Eight: R...What? This must be new?!?

Okay! Hmmm...RSS feeds...since I'm not really a reader of internet material, I prefer print text, I don't find this useful. I can see it would be nice to have instant access to new information from your favorite news sites, etc...but I just don't take the time to read that stuff. I confess...I'm a deleter of things without reading. I would think you could use this in class, especially science or social studies, to see current events, etc... If you were studying the planets, you might have a class blog with an RSS feed that your students could easily access for up to date information. As a librarian I could take advantage of this new technology by using it on my own website. I could have feeds for teachers to access, as well as feeds for myself in order to stay current in all the different curriculum areas. As for the optional part....I just went ahead and added the feeds to my blog instead of making my google reader, which I will rarely access, public. I hope you enjoy...I'll add more as I find things. Off on the next leg of my journey...signing off!

Thing Seven: I'll just google it...

For this one I went to a well used application. I'm definitely a google user and have used the calendar, google documents, and recently discovered the scholar search. For the calendar you could use it for you class assignments, or within a teaching team to keep track of things in one place where everyone has the right to add to the calendar. Personally I used it for a social calendar in an organization I was a volunteer in. Each age range had their own social calendar and were able to add them so that the social director had knowledge of what was going on. You could do the same thing with a planning platform at school. The documents are nice because he have access to them anywhere you can get internet. This might be useable for students to put their documents, share them, and have access to them both at home and school, easily. The scholar search was very handy for a grad student that might need to search quickly for an article over a specific subject. You could use this with your students to search different topics and see what comes up. You also might use it in the high school setting to find an article, read it, and write as summative response. This would be good practice for college life, and that might be great with the new standards to make students college ready. Okay, off to find something new on this journey...signing off!

Thing Six: Mashups make a difference

So, I checked out the mashups and used the Bookr since I'm an LA teacher and it seemed like something I could really use in my classroom. I made a little book about me, which I am going to post in this blog, and it was really simple. I was able to search directly from Flickr and paste it into my pages, and then add text. I could definitely use this as a way to get to know students in my class. In fact, next year we might start the year with this and have them all paste them into my blog so that we can find out about each other. I'm sure they would love that! I could also use it as a form of storyboarding. They would do a visual book of their story before they actually start writing their story. That is only the tip of the iceberg as to what I could do with a site like this. I hope you enjoyed playing as much as I did. Off to see what my journey hold next...I think it's thing seven? signing off...

Thing Five: Flickr

I traveled to Flickr today; I have used it before at school as well as shown many students searching for images on google where they can go to use pictures legally (as long as they give credit). I'm very familiar with it, and it is good for some things, but sometimes as you are searching you realize that you have strayed from where you started and it takes some work getting back. Tags, they are simply keywords that make is easier to find things later. You can essentially search using tags. As for the groups, that is simply the ability to create a group that you can share with. You can make it public or private, or public by invitation only. It does require an administrator, but it makes it possible to share photos within the group. You could definitely use this within your classroom. You could create a group with your students in order to share content. Well, I think that is all for now, oh, I did do some searches within my content area and found a homeschooler that use Flickr to share her homeschool products that she has made. I thought that was pretty cool; as teachers or librarians we could create groups in order to share similar types of content with our coworkers, etc...collaboration is the key after all, right?!?! Off to see where my journey will take me...signing off!

Thing Four: I'm official

Well, it's official, I'm a player! I hope I play well with others...do you? Are teachers the best at playing well with others, or are we lacking in that department? Just a random thought as I began thinking about the word "play." I got the email confirming I am an official player and just wanted to let everyone know. Continuing on my journey, stay with me it's should be a wild ride...signing off!

Thing Three: The Avatar

Hello, so I got my avatar all ready and posted it to my blog. It was really easy to create my avatar since I already had about 12 different looks saved. I used to use yahoo a lot, but now I rarely go there. I just adjusted it, updated it, and exported it to my blog. I simply clicked on the export link from the 23 things site and copied the html text. Then I went back to the blogger site, logged in, and went to layout. I just pasted the html text and saved it. It does require careful reading of instructions in order to find and complete the export task, but all in all it did not take that much time. Let me know what you think of my avatar! Off to continue the "thing" journey...signing off!

Thing Two: Life-long Learners

As I sat down and started watching The 7 1/2 Habits online tutorial I thought, what is this going to be about? Then, it started, quite slowly I might add, and we were off. Of all of the seven and a half habits talked about I would say the easiest one for me is accepting problems as challenges and not problems to solve. The hardest one for me might be "beginning with an end in mind." I'm a thinker, but I keep it all in my head, constantly changing, and that doesn't always lend itself to progressing through something to reach an end that I knew from the beginning. I am always changing and evolving; I can't say that it is a bad thing to find difficult, but there it is. I will say that pretty much all of the other habits were ones that I consistently do. I'm not so sure about the learning contract as that falls under the "begin with an ed in mind" part of things, and like I said, that is not my best, most used, habit. Heading off to step four...the journey continues..signing off!

Thing One: "It's okay to play in school..."

"It's okay to play in school," is the quote that most stuck out to me. I love it when I hear my students excitedly engaged in learning, with a big smile on their faces, and not even realizing that they are learning. I think some of my most favorite moments are the bunny trails during class. It is refreshing to see, and I look forward to "playing" while I travel through 23 things. What will I discover for me and my students to do? The journey begins...signing off!