#thattechyteacher

Well, it's nearing the end of July and I must admit, that I have never worked so hard during summer. I taught summer school, which I normally do, but also completing these past two classes, I must admit that I've worked harder than ever on my schoolwork. I feel like I've learned so much that I cannot wait to try out in the fall! The first thing I would like to try is implementing digital badges in my classroom. I feel like I'm getting pretty good with Google Draw and would love to create badges to keep track of mastery learning in my classroom. I feel like I still need to navigate how exactly I want to "display" and track the badges, but I love the idea and would love to explore it more in the fall. I also really loved the rubric creation this semester. I learned about so many great tools to create rubrics. For my portfolio projects next year I want to use Doctupus and Goobric as they link so well with Google Classroom and Google Sites! I also use...

When I think back to my first several years of teaching, I genuinely can say I'm mortified thinking of that teacher. I taught advanced math and there was a strict policy in place for students to stay in the course. I remember at first being extremely worried to reach out to parents to notify them if their child wasn't doing well. After a while, sometimes I had to have the difficult conversation of moving a student out of advanced math back into grade-level math. I remember watching their grades like a hawk thinking, if they fall below that grade, they will be moved out of my class. I felt like a guardian of advanced math; it was terrible. Honestly, if you asked me, grades removed, if a certain child belonged in advanced math or not, I could tell you. But in education, we always need data. It didn't matter what I thought. This week, I had the opportunity to look back on the history of grading. I remember in our very first course for this program, our teacher asked ...

I must admit that this course challenged me. There are several times where I get stuck in the rut of "this is math, we have standards to learn!" and "Projects! There's no time for projects!" But the truth is, there's always time to tie in the standards while still being effective and exploring topics at the same time. I had so much fun this semester thinking of everything I could do, and those deep essential questions I could explore with my students. When I first started teaching, I taught language arts for several years... in fact, that was what I student taught. I used to love those deep conversations that you get to have with kids! However, after teaching math for the last 6-8 years, I miss out on those opportunities. We have great conversations about numbers, but it just isn't the same. I would love to implement my percents PBL into my teaching next year especially since it involves so many fractions! One thing that I think I will struggle w...