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.
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/
May 11
The short answer was best said by Malala Yousafzai, “Education for EVERY child.” [Emphasis my own.] Friday, May 15, Chimacum School District educators voted unanimously to join many other schools in Washington state in what are being called rolling walkouts. (See this article in a local WA newspaper, the Peninsula Daily News.) Schools all over …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/05/11/why-are-chimacum-schools-having-a-1-day-strike/
Apr 30
I just got a $300 grant from my school district’s educational support foundation, the Friends of Chimacum! I submitted a proposal to purchase a couple of Sphero Robotic App Controlled Balls! I saw a Science teacher at this year’s NCCE conference playing with one of those and he was telling me how he used them …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/04/30/robotic-ball/
Apr 28
Sometimes tripling something can be good. Maybe not all that good for you, but good. Other times tripling something isn’t all that good for you and isn’t good any way you slice it. Sometimes it only benefits those in power. That tends to be the case with the form of assessment known as standardized testing. …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/04/28/sbac-triples-time-testing/
Apr 08
I took my Twitter Wakelet notes from NCCE 2015 and put together all the notes from the gamification and game-based learning sessions I attended. – Kids who dropout in HS actually became disengaged in middle school! (It’s our job to stop that from happening so the question becomes, how do we keep our middle school …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/04/08/my-gbl-gamification-ncce2015-notes/
Apr 06
I wrote a post for the Learn 2 Earn blog called How to Use Discussion Forums to Engage Every Student and it’s live! I share some tools that I have used with my Science students in grades 6, 7 and 8 over the years. Having a discussion forum for a face-to-face classroom allows for a …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2015/04/06/discussion-forums-in-science/
I'm a Curipod Ambassador! :)
I've presented at NCCE
2016, 2017, 2019, 2022,
2023, 2024, and 2025!
I presented at WSTA 2015!
