A Teacher's Ruminations

It's Tuesday Slice of Life at the Two Writing Teachers ! I am so happy to be here! Today is the second day of our Accreditation Visit and, if you've ever participated in this process, you may remember how stressful the time leading up to the visit can be. We've spent about a year, or more, doing a self-study. We've looked deeply into our school, extrapolating beyond our particular grade level, to come up with an "average" score for the whole school in a wide range of categories from teaching and learning to staff culture to human resources and more. It has been an interesting process for sure! This week our visiting team is here to verify the findings of our self-study, including our recommendations for improvement. They are meeting with groups of teachers, staff, students, parents and other school members. They are also visiting classrooms. Today two team members came into my classroom during writing workshop and reading workshop, respectively. One ...

I am preparing a brief session for teachers at my school on what it means to be a connected educator. I plan to talk about social media in general as a segue to discussing PLN's. I am going to talk about particular sites (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc) by sharing how I use each of these sites to enrich my own learning. I thought this might serve as a useful introduction. My hope is that teachers will participate in an internal Twitter chat to support each other in this process. I am looking for suggestions, cautions, aha moments, reccomendations and any other useful insight you can offer. Pleae leave these in the comments section below. I will share your wisdom with my colleagues.