Today marked our first session with Jim Cash, our IT Resource Teacher.
We had budgetted for two half days for Smart Board training, and two half days for co-planning in June, all of which we took this week. (And what a good week it turned out to be spending two full days in the air-conditioned glory of our Board's CBO, while our students and their respective supply teachers sweated it out in our UN-air-conditioned classrooms on 33degree heat and humidity, but that's a rant for another blog post, probably not one suitable for this blog at all!)
We spent the morning continuing to work on harvesting and mapping out more rich problems and math tasks according to our curriculum map, a task we had begun after visiting a classroom to obvserve a math lesson a few weeks ago. (And which will be available soon in the "lesson plans" section of this site.) We also took this rare (for a classroom teacher) visit to CBO to meet briefly with the behind the scenes people in finance, ie.the folks who assign us budget codes and reimburse us for out of pocket expenses according to our TLLP budget. They turned out to be very nice indeed and it was helpful for all of us to put faces to the names on emails lists that had been flying back and forth over the past several weeks.
After a delightfully yard duty-less lunch, we met with Jim and a colleague of his in a room he had booked for us at the Board Office. Jim had prearranged to have a Smart Board set up in the room, so we got right to work.
The primary focus of our afternoon was to be on beginning to develop a "Notebook file" (new lingo alert!!!) that would introduce our students to norms of classroom discussion, and begin to build oral language skills, a critical pre-curser to successful bansho, as we are discovering.
In addition to this, we were able to successfully download the Smart Board "Notebook" software onto my laptop so that we could continue working on this series of lessons.
Today was a fine example of job-embedded PD. We know what we need, and we are getting it. The profesional learning was practical, and although my head is swimming from all the new ideas and information, I am very excited to
We had budgetted for two half days for Smart Board training, and two half days for co-planning in June, all of which we took this week. (And what a good week it turned out to be spending two full days in the air-conditioned glory of our Board's CBO, while our students and their respective supply teachers sweated it out in our UN-air-conditioned classrooms on 33degree heat and humidity, but that's a rant for another blog post, probably not one suitable for this blog at all!)
We spent the morning continuing to work on harvesting and mapping out more rich problems and math tasks according to our curriculum map, a task we had begun after visiting a classroom to obvserve a math lesson a few weeks ago. (And which will be available soon in the "lesson plans" section of this site.) We also took this rare (for a classroom teacher) visit to CBO to meet briefly with the behind the scenes people in finance, ie.the folks who assign us budget codes and reimburse us for out of pocket expenses according to our TLLP budget. They turned out to be very nice indeed and it was helpful for all of us to put faces to the names on emails lists that had been flying back and forth over the past several weeks.
After a delightfully yard duty-less lunch, we met with Jim and a colleague of his in a room he had booked for us at the Board Office. Jim had prearranged to have a Smart Board set up in the room, so we got right to work.
The primary focus of our afternoon was to be on beginning to develop a "Notebook file" (new lingo alert!!!) that would introduce our students to norms of classroom discussion, and begin to build oral language skills, a critical pre-curser to successful bansho, as we are discovering.
In addition to this, we were able to successfully download the Smart Board "Notebook" software onto my laptop so that we could continue working on this series of lessons.
Today was a fine example of job-embedded PD. We know what we need, and we are getting it. The profesional learning was practical, and although my head is swimming from all the new ideas and information, I am very excited to