I teach 5th and 6th grade STEM in the lovely Pacific Northwest in a small, rural town called Chimacum. My goal is to help students discover that all learning is life-long and that 21st century tools can be used for work as well as fun.
Feb 29
Is this what you were thinking? Well, maybe we can teach students to meditate in school but if meditation is too controversial then a better way to support our students is to teach MINDFULNESS! Here are some links I’ve collected with resources and videos to help your students practice mindfulness. There’s a wave of articles, …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2016/02/29/meditation-in-school/
Feb 22
I’ve been fortunate to, after years of following people on Twitter who got to attend cool conferences and meet face-to-face with virtual friends, to have been able to go to the Northwest Council for Computer Education (NCCE) for the past two years at Seattle and Portland! So last spring, I took a risk. I was …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2016/02/22/presenting-at-ncce-2016/
Feb 17
What Made Standards Evil? I get it. Ever since No Child Left Behind, education reform has taken a turn for the worst. The mere mention of privatization, vouchers clouded under the guise of choice, charter schools, testing every kid, in every grade level, multiple times, and then making curriculum to prepare kids for the tests …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2016/02/17/are-standards-bad/
Feb 16
Standards, right?Standards have been around since way before the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Standards are a reality for classroom teachers and personally, for me, I can teach using Standards as guidelines. I trust that people smarter than me chose the standards, taking into account what kids need …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2016/02/16/ccss-ela-shift-1/
Feb 15
As a WA STEM PD school on year 2 of our grant work, we get to use an IrisConnect LiveView camera. What we’ve learned from WA STEM research is that WA state teachers want effective Professional Development (PD) that includes observing models of instruction, having time to practice and reflect, get peer coaching, and receive …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2016/02/15/live-coaching-pd/
Feb 14
Gamification and Game-Based Learning (GBL) are all about student engagement. Does the kid in the following picture look engaged? And how often do we see little ones looking like the one above? How often do we see teenagers not just sleeping in class because they are not getting enough sleep at night or because they …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2016/02/14/flow-in-school-gbl-gamification/
Feb 10
One switch I’ve made with my Science labs is in the way I have students write their conclusions. I’ve tried many different ways, I’ve even spent time working with my Science PLC on conclusion writing, and lately I’ve been having my students use the Claim, Evidence, Reasoning or CER method of writing conclusions. It’s quite …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2016/02/10/claim-evidence-reasoning-cer/
Feb 10
I feel like a real blogger now! Sure I started this WordPress blog with my first post on July 2006 (that’s coming up on 10 years!) but it wasn’t until a few years later that I started blogging for an audience beyond my students and their parents. Blogging on my own, for my own reflection …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2016/02/10/standards-good-or-bad/
Jan 18
I’ve been working on my school district’s tech committee since I started working at Chimacum in 1997. Our most recent district tech plan included a plan for moving our middle school to a 1:1 model. The plan required pretty substantial funding, the likes of a Tech Levy or a portion of a Capital Levy or …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2016/01/18/student-tech-support-edtech/
Jan 14
In my classroom students have iPads, Samsung Galaxy Tabs, Netbooks, Chromebooks, Laptops, or iMac desktop computers to choose from to do work that requires technology. Some of my devices are old enough that they are glitchy at best and downright frustrating to do anything other than surfing the net. We had some troubles when first …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2016/01/14/multiple-gafe-accounts-shared-devices/
I'm a Curipod Ambassador! :)
I've presented at NCCE
2016, 2017, 2019, 2022,
2023, 2024, and 2025!
I presented at WSTA 2015!
