Happy Thanksgiving!
December 1st PD - you should have received (or will receive soon) an email from the person facilitating your professional development activity the afternoon of December 1st. It will include the location of your PD. If you do not receive that by next Monday, let Leslie or I know.
December 15th PD - An email came to your yesterday from me with a link to a survey. This information will help us plan our upcoming building PD. Please take time to complete this today or over the holiday break. This is not an evaluative survey!! We want to know how we can support each teacher where she is at now - just like you'd do for your own students.
TechnoTip - The quiz I created above took 10 minutes to complete and post. MyStudiyo is a tool that allows you make great looking quizzes for your website or blog. Try it out on your own blog sometime. The teachers who commented online liked MyStudiyo because it:
- is free.
- is very easy to use.
- has many uses across all age groups and subject areas.
- could be used to monitor and assess student learning.
The 2010 Home-Stretch - It is hard to believe we are entering December next week! As we approach the last few weeks of school prior to winter break, please continue to push toward your team SMART goals, hold students accountable (behaviors and academics) and support your team as much as possible. Personally, we know the holiday season can be stressful so we also need to understand that many of our students are involved in similar stressors too. Please let Nicole, Lyndsay or I know if we can be supportive to students, families and staff members if needed.
Please review last week's FWR for other important information about the days ahead!
Final Thoughts for the Week
...where I keep talking/typing and you
don't necessarily have to continue listening/reading.
This week's thoughts were sent to me by Carrie Dirksen. Thanks for sharing something you found that applies very well to your colleagues!!
..I believe effective educators must be creative thinkers with an ability to inspire and empower all learners. They must be compassionate, understanding and unwilling to give up on a child. They must be explicit and systematic, yet generously flexible, in their instruction. They must be knowledgeable of subject matter as well as the technologies of the day’s prevailing information landscape. They must be observant of student behavior to identify what each student does and does not understand, and how they can apply what they understand. They must be able to read and understand test data and read the faces of their learners. In short, teaching is a very difficult job and requires many characteristics to meet the needs of diversified learners. Teachers are also among the most powerful people on the planet.
