After a long, crazy, drawn-out summer of applications and interviews, (and not feeling like blogging), I'm back at school, teaching 7th grade Computers and 8th grade Photojournalism. This is a definite change from a 7th grade self-contained class, a change I'm thrilled to make. However, I'm not thrilled that I'll be traveling between 4 schools!!
There are definitely some bonuses though :-) One of those is that I get more prep, which is fantastic! I'm planning on using some of the extra time to do professional development with teachers who want it. I started out with this last week by doing a quick, 1 hour, "Meet Your Activboard" session for teachers who are brand new to it. They loved it. The more time I spend with teachers and technology, I realize that there are very few people who are totally against technology in the classroom; it turns out that most teachers would really like to learn how to use it, they just haven't had quality professional development. I hope that I can alleviate that issue :-)
Today was the first day of school, and I taught 2 lessons three or four times each, which I LOVED! 45 minutes each, and out the door :-) Such a relief. I think I'm going to love teaching photojournalism with the 8th graders. We did a brief discussion of what it was, and to give them a taste, I showed them a few photos from this series by the 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner. They were fascinated with it. Then, both 7th and 8th graders used www.wallwisher.com to post some unique things about themselves. Additionally, the 8th graders posted an image from Google of something that represented them (couldn't be a person) and they did a pretty good job, though 45 minutes for all of this plus going over rules wasn't quite enough time. Luckily, I have 19 more times to teach these classes to get everything right :-)
I think it'll be a good year :-)
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