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.
Aug 28
I’ve been toiling over what tools to use this year in my Science classes. I’ve been making regular use of 3D GameLab as my main LMS (Learning Management System), Classblogmeister as our class blog for student blogs, Shivtr as our class discussion forum for online, asynchronous discussions, and Classdojo and Remind for parent communication (along …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/08/28/hard-decisions/
Aug 12
AND? OR? [Note: since the writing of this post Classcraft has undergone some major updates. I haven’t used it since the updates so I can’t speak to those. From what I’ve read and heard the free version is still a lot like what I write about here. In order to use Classcraft more like an …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/08/12/3dgamelab-and-classcraft/
Jul 06
I’ve participated in some great partnerships from the North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership (NCOSP) to the Olympic Math and Science Partnership (OMSP) to the brand new Olympic STEM Pathways Partnership (OSPP). I have learned so much from the partnerships I’ve been involved in which is why I jumped at the opportunity to join this …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/07/06/another-cool-partnership/
May 27
Years ago I started a best practices document. My school district’s tech committee was working on defining what we should be doing in the classroom before we helped teachers integrate technology. Using technology to do the same things that weren’t helping students won’t improve student learning. I made the document editable by all who had …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/05/27/best-practices-collaborative-document/
May 25
This is the conclusion of our Star Trek part live action role play, part choose-your-own-adventure story: The QR code is clickable. I had planned to share this conclusion right after spring break but I had hoped to share it before spring break. Instead the QR codes were put up in my room now, at the …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/05/25/final-trek-chapter/
May 22
Not real war, this post has the next chapters of our ongoing missions aboard the class Starship Equinox. 🙂 After the mid-season finale, last post in this series, we were left with the mystery of destruction of the Tholian ship, the Aen’q Tholis. Unlike the Bombay and the Endeavour and the Equinox, the Aen’q Tholis …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/05/22/averting-war/
May 20
I published this post a little over a year ago. I wanted to re-publish it because of the lessons learned when I wrote it, especially the posts I linked to. It all started in 2011 when I wrote this. Last year [the 2012-13 school year] our middle school staff agreed to stop choosing Student’s of …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/05/20/craving-acknowledgement-revisited/
May 18
One of my blog posts sparked a comment where the question of teacher motivation came up. Specifically if tying standardized test scores to teacher evaluation can be motivating to teachers. What follows is the comment along with the questions and my response: “Good luck with your efforts. Truly shameful that you’re not getting enough support …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/05/18/teacher-motivation/
May 17
I think as educators we have opportunities to redefine ourselves. This is especially true for those of us who were taught or trained in very traditional methods. It was then very easy for us to teach our students using the very same traditional methods that were used on us. It’s even worse if those traditional …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/05/17/redefining-oneself/
May 15
This morning instead of having a half day of school Chimacum teachers unanimously voted to ask our district to cancel school so that we could participate in our state’s school walkouts urging our legislature to fulfill their paramount duty to fully fund education. My last post explains why we chose to walk out and protest …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/05/15/chimacums-walkout-for-education/
I'm a Curipod Ambassador! :)
I've presented at NCCE
2016, 2017, 2019, 2022,
2023, 2024, and 2025!
I presented at WSTA 2015!
