The Kinesthetic Classroom

I attended a session on teaching through movement. The speaker led with "your immune system is eavesdropping on your inner dialogue." - Deepak The speaker used John Ratey's research support from SPARK detailing the science of exercise and the brain. The emphasis was on "fitness over sitness" across all academic classrooms. Practical strategies were given to easily incorporate movement into any class that were immediately applicable on my return to the classroom on Wednesday. The speaker argues that meaning making is state dependent and learning is a very powerful tool to make learning relevant. It was an engaging session because the speaker practiced what he was preaching by engaging session attendees in many of his suggested activities.

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Lead Like A Pirate

I think my favorite session was called "Lead Like A Pirate" which was titled after the book. The presenter's school theme is "Making school a place where kids are banging down the door to get in, not out". I thought this sounded a lot like our school philosophy. She shared LOTS of great ideas that her school uses including Teen Tweet, hiding secret eggs, Birthday carts, and more. It got me thinking about different ideas we could do in our school and I can use in my Advisory to make school an enjoyable place for the students and for the teachers. There was an emphasis on taking care of the teachers so they will take care of the kids. It made me try to think of ways we can take care of each other. I went online and bought the book "Teach Like A Pirate". I also went to another presentation on scheduling intervention in a tight schedule. It gave me some great ideas for trying to help us bring math intervention into the school day. I don't ...

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

I attended a short Speed Learning Session with Vicki Meigs-Kahlenberg and enjoyed it so much that I ended up purchasing her book The Author's Apprentice . Essentially, Vicki's session was on not letting narrative writing fall by the wayside in the world of high-stakes testing. She talked about teaching students to develop their writing voices by studying the works and process of popular young adult authors such as Kwame Alexander, Jacqueline Woodson, Jason Reynolds, and Lois Lowry. I have always been interested in using mentor texts to teach students writing strategies such as "Show, Don't Tell" and dialogue that develops characters, but I felt like Vicki's process takes this one step further because she has students research the actual authors and learn about their lives and writing processes. There is no one correct way to write. Every author plans, drafts, and revises differently, and I think sharing this with students makes the whole writing process seem m...

"Hacking Google for Educators" by Brad Currie

I attended a few technology sessions rich in ideas that can be implemented very easily into most content areas. I’d like to share some of those here, in case you’d like to check them out. Hacking Google for Educators (by Brad Currie) Poll Everwhere: Add-on; Can be embedded into Google Slides Flip Grid: Post video clips (like asking students questions) and use in lieu of or in addition to a live classroom discussion; can be accessed through Google Classroom Mind Meister : Google Doc Add-On; takes bulleted lists and turns into a more dynamic mind map Screencastify: Google extension; use to create tutorials or how to’s; students can create these to demonstrate a skill; teachers can use to create tutorials which can be uploaded to Canvas ReadWrite for Google Classroom: Google extension; use to differentiate reading content for students at various reading levels Google Classroom: now has the ability to give different assignments to each student And a few good ...

Patton @ AMLE 2017

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