Technology PLC

So as I was looking for a resource for this week’s readings I stumbled onto a Laptop Learning Community in Ning. It’s an online learning community that seems to support teachers who are currently teaching in a laptop environment or teachers who are interested in finding more information about laptop learning. Being a teacher that will soon be working in a 1:1 laptop I am very interested in seeing how other teachers are able to handle the situation. I would like to be able to look at what other people are doing and even have the possibility of staring a conversation on the site for specific things I would like to look at.

Through the site I found an article about how one school district was able to do a successful laptop rollout. I appreciate that much of what the author of the article said in terms of the laptops being a tool and not the focus of the classroom. I believe that I will be able to gain a lot of insight from this laptop learning community and I hope that my school is eventually as successful with the laptops as this school district seems to be.

Ok I have to soap box for a moment...

I’m in the need for a small rant, and I’m going to try my hardest to rant quickly and then be done.

So here goes…
When did it become ok for people to be bad at math? People, professional people, will laughingly joke about how they can barely balance their checkbooks to anybody who will listen. Parents walk into conferences and make the comment, “Oh, I was never good at math either,” as if math ability is somehow a genetic trait. Teachers and administrators wrinkle up their noses when they hear that I’m a math teacher and will say how much they disliked math in school. I wonder how many of these same people would be just as happy to let the world know that they have trouble reading or never learned to read at all.

I would like people to realize just how much their attitudes are picked up by the people around them. I found this great article about how female elementary teachers really influence their female students’ attitudes about math and the young girls’ math abilities. When I read this I considered how I portray myself as a female math teacher, but also the side comments that I make about other subject areas. I hope that I have not negatively influenced my students about other classes and I’m going to try to be more conscience of what I say in the future.

Rant’s officially over, thanks for reading.

Math stuff...

Show of hands, who wants to meander around the internet reading blogs rather than grading papers? That would be me right now! I realize now how people can lose so much time just wandering around the net. So I started on this great math blog that someone else had posted, from there I just started blog jumping until I got to another site that was math teachers at play. While I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this information in my class I figure if I keep looking at different blogs including this one I’ll be able to get some great ideas to use in my classroom. And since I try to be a nice person to the people I work with I figure I can share what I’m finding with my colleagues.

PLC tools for all

After leaving class on Thursday night I felt really optimistic about this course. I really liked what we did in class and I was even able to see a few ways that I might be able to use something like bookmarks and tags, things I had previously dismissed as less than useful for my classroom.

While searching around the web, I remembered a web site I had heard about at a PLC conference called all things PLC. I wandered around the website and was looking through the articles and research section when I came across this one article that seemed like it was something that might be in one of our syllabi for this program. It’s a great article talking about the need to get information into our schools in a different way. Learning needs to be more engaging for both students and teachers. One way to do this would be to use blogs and wikis in classrooms.

Have another great week!

Hi to all in 6030.

Just in case any of you were wondering about the free pictures I've been able to find, you want the website www.compfight.com. This site has great pictures that are available to anyone free from copyright issues. This might also be a great site for you to pass along to any of your students who are making projects. Use and enjoy! :)

-Lisa