World, Meet Monarch.

Like anyone, my writing is informed by my world. Allow me to introduce you to my unusual school to help you get a perspective on where I am coming from.

Monarch School is not like other schools. Our school is a part of the largest public school district in the state of Georgia, but I still often run into people in my district who have never heard of my school and are perplexed when they hear what we do. We are a public, special needs school serving children ages 3-4, and serving young adults ages 18-21. We have no K-12, and technically no regular ed, in our building, but we are indeed a public school serving kids in a full-day program. We serve students with a variety of exceptionalities: autism, vision impairments, hearing impairments, intellectual disabilities, orthopedic impairments, and more! Our adult students work on skills related to community participation, work, leisure, independent living, and volunteerism. The preschoolers work on academic goals to prepare them for kindergarten.

Now, why did I say that we “technically” have no regular ed in our building? That is another point that makes us unusual: we have a private, non-profit organization working out of our building that serves low-income families by providing a state pre-k and a national Headstart program for typically-performing children. This provides the pre-k and Headstart students an opportunity to receive a quality, full-day education in a public school setting. Because our early childhood program includes self-contained, collaborative, and inclusion classes, our special needs students benefit by having the opportunity to learn alongside typically-performing peers. With district teachers and paras working alongside private teachers and assistants, we learn from each other as a staff as well.

As the technology coordinator, I am at the helm of our technology program along with our support technician and media specialist. I teach a computer lab special to our preschoolers, provide professional development to staff, and collaborate with my team on budget and purchasing decisions. Because our students do not have textbooks, our principal believes that the technology provides a means for teaching curriculum for our students. I am fortunate to have a supportive administration who sees the value in fully integrating technology into quality instruction, and we have an innovative technology program with many of the latest tools at our fingertips. We see technology as a tool that helps level the playing field for our low-income and special needs students, while preparing them for whatever they will encounter outside of our walls. It’s my aim to enable the staff to wisely use all that is at their disposal, with the NETS for Teachers and Students as my guide.

That’s my school in a nutshell. What is your school like?

Web 2.0 Wednesday: Is Your Classroom Deranged?

Are you back in school yet? A new year is a great time to adjust your classroom layout. I have for your consideration several tools to help you arrange your classroom virtually before you begin to shove furniture around.The tool you choose will depend on your needs and what you're working with.

• Classroom Architect features an easy drag-and-drop arrangement tool with by far the best selection of standard furniture options of any of the tools, plus the ability to edit the dimensions of the room. You can also draw your own items in and add text. You can even set the color of the items you draw. Many items can be rotated, though there is no feature to size them that I could find. The classroom shape is limited to a square or rectangle, but you can set the dimensions. You have the option of saving or printing your creation.

• Scholastic Class Set-Up Tool also has a drag-and-drop interface. There are fewer furniture options here, and you can't draw your own, though they've included some basic shapes you can use for approximation. Items can be rotated and sized. Classroom shape is limited to square or rectangular, and you cannot set the dimensions. There is a seating chart feature that allows you to enter student names next to numbers on the left and then drag the numbers onto the floor plan to show where students will sit. Unfortunately, in my attempt the numbers were hidden behind the desks, and there was no way I saw to bring them to the front. You can print your layout when you're finished, but you don't have an option to save.

• Lakeshore Learning's Classroom Designer is the only tool that had some sample classroom layouts you could view and edit based on the type of class. They have rooms for infants through grade 3. You can also create a room from scratch. Again, all rooms were rectangular or square.You have full control of the size of a standard item by editing the actual width and length in inches, and you can rotate items to any angle by degrees. There were not as many generic furniture choices here, though there were two features that stood out with regard to the selection of items for the room. First, they had some of those annoying and confusing room features like "post" and "wall" that real classrooms can have, so you can add in your layout roadblocks. You might even use the "wall" item to block off an area if your room is not a perfect rectangle or square. Second, if you're flush with cash or just have a room full of Lakeshore furniture, you can actually add items from the catalog, and they are scaled to the actual size. A photo and a link to view details appears at the top for any catalog items, and it keeps a running total of the cost, as well as the option to order the whole room with one button. When you're finished, Lakeshore gives you the option of saving, printing, or emailing your room.

• Microsoft has an article on using Office tools to design your layout, including advice on how to arrange the room, as well as a template and directions for using PowerPoint. You can add comments and notes to your seating chart as well as tracking how your classroom layout changes. Of course you can save or print your creation when you're finished. You could also select all of the parts of your design, right click, and choose Save As Picture to quickly create an image file.

Friday Five: 5 Things Educators Should Avoid in Social Media

Educators have always been under the microscope, but with social media it is even more pronounced. You’ve probably read stories about teachers getting disciplined or fired over something posted on Facebook. Most teaching contracts and licensing ethics lists contain wording about educators appearing respectable in public and not embarrassing the school or the system. Here, for your consideration, are five things you shouldn't do on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other social networking sites. Better safe than sorry!

1. Don’t post, or allow someone else to post, the infamous “red cup” photo. You may have been drinking a Sprite in that cup, but someone may mistake it for a beer.
2. Stay away from offensive language such as swear words.
3. If you have a complaint about your district, principal, or school, or you need to blow off some steam, do it in person, over the phone, or on your own private email to one recipient--not on Facebook or Twitter. In fact, be careful about that email. Are you absolutely sure the recipient won’t forward it to anyone else?
4. Never talk about students negatively, even “anonymously.” Leaving out the student’s name will not save you from a charge of making your school look bad.
5. Avoid leaving your privacy up to the default settings on Facebook. Adjust your privacy settings within your account settings page to control who can see your posts. Remember, you can control who is on your friends list, but you can’t control their friends lists. Do you know who your FOAFs (Friends Of A Friend) are? Can they see what you post?

One final “do” for the list: Do make sure your friends know that you are an educator, and how important your digital life can be to your career. Ask them not to tag you without your approval, and to be careful what they post on your wall.

Web 2.0 Wednesday: What's Your Readability?

Do you teach children with learning disabilities? How about kids with attention deficit? Maybe you just have some typical students who are easily distracted. This week’s tool will help you simplify reading on the web for your students. Readability is a tool that takes an article on a website and condenses it down to the simplest form: just a headline and text, with all distraction stripped away. Sound good?

The first thing you’ll notice when you go to the Readability site is that they are pushing a paid subscription. For the purposes of most teachers, though, the free option is just fine! Click on the link to install add-on. There is a browser add-on you can install for Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, and they offer bookmarklets for other browsers or for those who don’t want to install an add-on.

Once you’re set up, visit a page with an article. I visited the Today Show website and found a human interest article. Here’s the original view. Note the animated ad at the top right, the buttons on the bottom and on the far right, the social networking buttons, etc. As you scrolled down there was another flashy ad as well.

I clicked my “Read Now” button in my browser (you could also use the bookmarklet in your bookmarks/favorites bar), and I instantly got this cleaner view with all of the ads and other buttons removed. Note that Readability does have its own simple toolbar, visible on the left, and unfortunately, we've lost the cute dog photo.

You can bookmark the Readability version of a page to link it on a Sqworl, blog, or web page. You can also save files to your Kindle automatically. They don’t offer other mobile platforms, but both iTunes and the Android App Store offer a Kindle reader app, so that covers iPad, iPhone, and Android users.

What do you think? Could Readability help your students to focus? Would you “clean” the articles ahead of time for your students, or allow them to use the tool themselves? How could you use it in your classroom?

Use the real world to teach grammar skills

I spotted this quote on the wall at a restaurant recently:

If you're like me, you look at this and your eyes are immediately drawn to that comma. Yep, it's a comma splice, and grammar geek obsessives like me can't look around us and not see these things everywhere. I used to get amused when I saw this kind of thing, and then once I started teaching I got annoyed: The errors these adults are making are the same skills I was teaching my fourth graders year in and year out. It's enough to make a teacher feel defeated, like they will never learn.

I'm an optimist, though. There's almost always a more positive way you can look at a discouraging situation, and I started to see all of these errors as an opportunity: that ever-present teachable moment that invigorates our practice. I started to plot. What if I could turn the errors of these adults into impetus for my kids to strive? What if it was a competition to have the kids outsmart the grown-ups?

This idea percolated in my head for probably 3 years, popping up off and on. I started taking photos with my phone whenever I spotted an error, and making screen captures (Ctrl + Prt Scrn copies, and then you can paste it into another document) of errors I found online and in emails. I toyed with several ideas in my mind about how best to implement it, and finally settled on a nod to Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader. I turned my thought experiment into an interactive bulletin board, building the pieces over time and eventually putting it all together for my students to use. I planned to introduce the board to them and perhaps offer some sort of recognition if they were able to correct the adults' errors. 

Boy was I shocked the first day it went up. My students walked into the room first thing in the morning and walked over to the board. They stood around it. They discussed it. They debated what the errors were. Then they came and asked my permission to take an answer slip and interact with it! They actually asked if it was okay! The bulletin board was an instant hit, and kids begged me to allow them to work on it during free time. I was floored!

Over the course of the school year I refined my bulletin board, adding tags on challenging examples with hints as to the numbers and types of errors. I decided to recognize success with the board by printing students' names in the class newsletter, on the class website, and to hang up the correct answers next to the original errors. When a photo really had them stumped, I either removed it till a more opportune time, used it for a mini-lesson, or provided hints. I changed the examples out frequently; novelty kept up the students' interest.

Does this sound like something you could implement in your classroom? If you want to tackle it yourself, you can Google "grammar fail" to get yourself started. If you adhere to the favorite teacher aphorism, "No need to re-invent the wheel," you might check out my Grammar Fail! Bulletin Board and Center set on Teachers Pay Teachers. Either way, I hope that the errors of others will yield stunning grammar learning for your students!

Let us know whether you plan to implement the Grammar Fail bulletin board in your classroom, and leave us a link to your favorite grammar fail example!

Related Resources:

Grammar Fail! Bulletin Board or Literacy Center, $5.00

Grammar I Have / Who Has, $2.00

Sentence Types File Folder Game, $3.00

Subject/Predicate File Folder Game, $3.00

Grammar Rocks! 10 Reproducibles for Grammar Rock Videos, $3.50

Friday Five: 5 Things They Didn't Tell You in College

Most teacher prep programs are pretty good these days. I know that pre-service teachers at my own alma mater spend a lot more time in the classroom than we did when I went there twenty years ago. No college program can give you the whole picture, though. Here are 5 things that yours may have neglected to mention! On a side note, how could it be twenty years since I was an undergrad? When did I get so old?!

1. No teacher writes a 2-page lesson plan for every 30 minute lesson. It’s impossible. Using the little squares in the traditional plan book is okay. No one will throw you in the dungeon for it!
2. It’s okay to hug your elementary students or pat them on the back. Just don’t touch them in any way when anyone is angry. A gentle hand on the back as you ask a student to get in line can be described to a parent or administrator as a shove if the student is angry. Just don’t take the chance.
3. There will be students you desperately try to help and just don’t get anywhere. You only have them for one year out of their lives. Just do your best and don’t beat yourself up about it.
4. It’s okay to use textbooks! Your district paid a lot of money to provide them for you, and many of them include great ideas for differentiation, managing materials, project-based learning, and incorporating literature. Go ahead and use them!
5. Experienced teachers may naysay some of your enthusiastic, new teacher ideas. If there is specific feedback (“That’s a big time commitment”), listen and consider with an open mind, then make your own decision. There are hundreds of reasons why something might work for you and not for another teacher. If the feedback isn’t specific (“That’ll never work”), ask for clarification, or just ignore it!

You’ll find your own way over time. The enthusiasm and excitement you feel as a new teacher is great fuel for all you want to do! Use it!

 
Did I leave out something that you wish they’d told you in college? List it in the comments section!

Web 2.0 Wednesday: Catch that Sqworl!

Today’s Web 2.0 tool is Sqworl. This site makes it extremely easy to build a graphical list of links that shows a thumbnail of each page. Check out the Teaching Blog Sqworl for a great example. In the classroom, you could create a Sqworl with links for students to use at home, including favorite games and videos from class. Make a Sqworl that includes all of the sites students should visit for a research project. Have a different list for each subject area or class that you teach, and link them to your class web page. Sqworl is ideal for PK-1 and special needs students who are non-readers because of the thumbnail image that shows the page with the link. Sqworl is free to use, though there is a premium option that removes ads from your lists and allows you to make a list private. That costs $3.99 per month (kind of a lot, in my opinion).

There are so many ways to use this tool. Add your ideas in the comments section!