Joyce Valenza tagged me for a meme on what I want to teach in 2009. So, here are some of the things I want to help my elementary kids learn in 2009.
- When I came to North we had one of those programs where students read the books and then take the quiz. It has finally reached the point where it can’t be upgraded and will soon be dead. This is going to provide us the perfect opportunity to take advantage of some of the other ways we can get students to respond to what they read. Our automation system, Destiny, has the ability for students to write book reviews and post them right to the record. They can recommend titles to their friends and send me suggestions on books they wish we had.
- We are just dabbling with blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other various Web 2.0 tools. We need to dive a lot deeper! We’ve written a grant to help add technology resources and training in 2009, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed we get it. I need to provide more opportunities for our students (and teachers) to use these tools.
- I want to get our students using our Moodle server. I think there is a lot of opportunity for students to connect with technology at home, during literacy stations, etc., and think our Moodle could an easy mechanism for that.
- We continue to help our students learn to cite sources. We made great progress with that this year, but there is always room for improvement. As we (teachers and library media specialist) learn more about Copyright and Creative Commons, we’ve have to continue to think how we teach this to younger learners — that will be something for me to work on this year.
- I want to teach our kids how to find those gems in the chapter books. I think sometimes I just seem them walk up and down the rows and they aren’t really looking or finding anything. Part of that will come after we do a big weed of the fiction (or at least I hope we get to that this year), but the other part will come from me making sure through book talks and one on one interaction I help guide them to those great books they might be missing.
A colleague of mine has a favorite saying - “As good as we are, we can always get better!” I wholeheartedly believe that. I know there is always more to do and I’m not always good about just picking a few things to really focus on. I want to do it all and want to do it all now. This was a good exercise in trying to maybe focus a bit on just a few things.
I tag: Sara Kelly Johns, Diane Chen, Peggy Milam, Kristin Fontichiaro
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