Crazy Time of Year

I don't know what is crazier, the beginning of a school year or the end. I do know that the craziest time of day is dismissal. This last Thursday, a few minutes after dismissal, a man snuck into our school and was in the middle of stealing from my purse. I walked in my classroom just as he started. I think I scared him as much as he scared me. I screamed and we wrestled a bit before he pushed me to the ground as he ran off. He didn't get anything besides some change, but as a school we are working on our dismissal procedures. I guess this is a sign of how hard things are for others.

After reading the article, Feedback that Fits, I started to re-evaluate some things I do when providing feedback. I found that I fix the mechanics myself and just gave general/personal comments. I am going to make improving on this a goal for myself. Three things I took from this article is when a sentence doesn't make sense, a great comment is to ask the student rewrite the sentence so it goes better with the one before. The second thing that I took from this article is to point out successes...sometimes I find I focus on only the negative things a student does when writing. I really want my students to see that they can make progress. Finally, I liked how the article gave examples of appropriate comments. I recently have acquired two teacher resources, one with example comments on students' writing, another with example comments for report cards. I think this will help me start to attain my goal :)

When I explored a few of the student response technology tools, I found that I like them because they seem easy to use. I have heard of some but must admit that I haven't used them yet. Being a newer teacher, I find it is hard to reinvent the wheel and to always create new things while learning the curriculum. I think that is why I haven't used these sights.

I would like to comment briefly on resources I learned to use for each strategy. For setting objectives, I think I would use some of the data collecting tools such as survey monkey. My principal has sent out these surveys to the staff in the past and thought it was very easy to use. I haven't looked to much in depth with these tools, but I wonder if I could have students create brief surveys to collect some data and then graph it on excel. Do these data collection tools require email addresses or do they provide a link where students could access the survey? For providing feedback, I think I would use some of the word processing applications. Maybe I'm a little behind and until recently I never knew that changes could be tracked and comments could inserted in a word document. I would like to do this but my school got office 2010...I wonder if the steps are the same as mentioned in the book. I think this would be great for students to learn for peer editing where they would be applying not only proofreading skills, but computer skills as well. For providing recognition, I liked how resources were included for printable certificates. I also like the idea of putting students work on school websites, but I wonder if last names/pictures should be included? I know the parents permission is needed but one can never be too careful when placing thing on the web.