Team Teachers

The Updated Teacher Roll Call

Charellabon took it upon herself to take on the daunting task of organizing the Teacher Roll Call.  Girlwithalessonplan started the roll call by keeping a blog post of teacher bloggers before the #education tag was officially started.  World-shaker took it a step further by using GoogleDocs to create a submit form that exported all the information into a spreadsheet.

Charellbon has checked each entry, identified defunct tumblrs, and organized each blog by state.  You can now view the master list and even find people by state/location. She should be applauded for her work on this.  

So, what’s new?

1. Sorting by Location groups, alphabetically by state abbreviations, on the Master Roll Call, which is the main spreadsheet and the first page (and thus called the Master, due to subsequent spreadsheets following the Master Roll Call).

This roll call is available to the public, but only to those with the link.

Link to the Master Roll Call: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArEdPVjEjZTjdEx4MER4a2ZKaEFkQ3VRRVExcW9zUkE#gid=14

2. A new Submit form to point to the To Be Added/Filed tab, the tab directly to the right of the Master Roll Call spreadsheet.

The To Be Added/Filedtab gets updated live. Char will plan to manage future entries by manually transferring them from the To Be Added/Filedtab onto the Master Roll Calland respective Location sheets. Note that the form is the same exact form from the original (I copied and pasted), but with a different destination. 

Link to the new Submit form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1MsiEYZYSInaR_WntyneMFr3IdXVIJji_Z3w15ICCmIs/viewform

3. Specific Location spreadsheets within the Master Roll Call (i.e., CA Tumblr Teacher spreadsheet tab). 

4. Location spreadsheet tabs at the bottom (desktop view) or top (mobile view) are also listed alphabetically.

5. Pink highlighted entries indicating defunct, “not found” tumblrs.

We will eventually be deleting these blogs from the list.  

~~~

Char noted the following:

In addition to making these 20 spreadsheets plus the Submit form, I crunched out some numbers out of curiosity: 

- 1377 total entries of Tumblr teachers!

- 223 defunct tumblrs within the Master Roll Call. 
This still means we have 1,154 active Tumblr Teachers out there - over a THOUSAND entries, folks!

- The leading location - as far as numbers are concerned - is our International tumblrs, with 237 active entries. Then No Response tumblrs, with 93 active entries, followed by California tumblrs, with 82 active entries. New York is the runner up, with 75 active tumblrs.

Again, major props to Charaellbon for this.  She’s a education-licensed homeschooling mom and relatively new to Tumblr #education, so give her a follow and thank her for her work.  

Hoping for a SUPER year

Hey all,

I am entering my third year of teaching second grade and looking forward to it. My first year, I centered my classroom community around the theme of baseball. My students loved it! Last year, I seemed to have lost my spark and gave up on the idea. At the end of the school year, a former student remarked that I should have done a theme again. I decided to take his advice and my superhero theme was born. 

Just wondering-  anyone else doing a classroom theme?

New Teacher

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone could offer advice to me - I just took a sixth grade position teaching Language Arts and Science. The position is in a rough neighborhood, and I do not have experience with teaching past third grade. 

School starts next week. What should I prepare? What rules should I set? I have thousands of questions, and I am nervous. 

GWALP Responds:  You need to contact your school immediately, not people on the Internet.  You need to speak with your principal and/or department chair and the coworkers you’ll work closest with.  Contact the secretary to get names and numbers.  

Telling us it’s a “rough neighborhood” doesn’t give us the details to give you any advice at all, and we’re not the ones to really give what I think you’re looking for.  

Leaving the Paper Behind

I’m sick of paper. Sick of photocopying. I have 150+ students and that’s a lot of paper, especially when I change my plans so often that so much of it goes to waste.

As part of the development of our new World Language curriculum, our department was given 5 iPads/teacher to pilot their use. With only 5 iPads for a class of 20, I’ve been struggling with how to actually use them. How do I split 5 iPads between 20 kids and avoid fighting?

I recently attended a session at the NICE (Northern Illinois Computing Educators) Conference about a 1:1 iPad classroom, presented by Nadine Norris and Angelique Masellis, and decided to see if some of her ideas could work with my limited supply of iPads. Angelique talked about taking pictures of worksheets and putting them into Explain Everything. How easy is that?! Once in the app, students can write over the worksheet and present to the class.

I walked the students through the process of retrieving the document through Dropbox and through the first few questions on the worksheet and they were off and running! This was such a great way to have them work in groups, save paper, use technology and do an informal assessment all at the same time! Students not only had fun with the technology, but worked on essential skills such as turn taking, listening, group work and more!

The best part of all of this, is that the iPad was merely a means to an end. The lesson was not about the app I chose or the device itself, but rather about the content that was loaded to the device. Technology can’t be the lesson, but it can be a tool that enhances our students’ learning and excitement about a topic.

_____

A great submission!  What useful professional development have you all attended?  How have you incorporated the ideas you heard about into your teaching?   How are others using the Ipad in the classroom (especially with a limited supply)?

I Know Why the Caged Birds Sings/ELL

Hey there fellow teachers!

I am in a bit of a jam. I teach middle school language arts/reading. I have a few ELL students but 1 of my 7th graders has been really struggling. I have been adapting lessons for him so far, but I feel I am coming up short when trying to plan for our next area of study. Right now the plans are for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I know he will have some big problems with it-he just barely make it through Holes and The Call of the Wild and told me after each book that they were very difficult to understand for him because of the language difference. I dont want to see him struggle to the point of frustration and lost hope-I just want to challenge him! I don’t mind giving him a different book with similar themes and I would hope it stays in a nonfiction/realistic fiction genre.

I just need some help-PLEASE!!

~ Help a teacher out? -PPT

Wellness?

PPT recently posted about a healthy recipe exchange on tumblr, and I read it and thought, “Especially quick ones!”

This made me think about the general issue of wellness within the teaching community. I can’t be the only first-year teacher (or student teacher, or 7th year teacher, or grad student, or what-have-you) who has been known to skip a meal, cut back on sleep, and completely forgo exercise in an effort to maximize productivity. It’s a topic that seems to come up repeatedly whenever I talk with other people in education.

I wonder if our community would benefit from occasionally sharing wellness tips: a quick healthy recipe, suggestions on valuable ways to spend that extra 15 or 20 minutes you find in a day, etc—just as reminders that we need to look for ourselves, too. These posts already crop up from time to time—maybe a wellness tag?

__________________________________

Yes!  Sometimes I do my thinking “out loud” on my own Tumblr that involves ideas for Team Teachers.  The wellness aspect of our community is one that has been on my mind for a while.

Here is what I propose:

Either a “Wellness Wednesday” done each week (using that as a tag) during which you can share tips / recipes with reminders being posted on Team Teachers.

Or just make a certain day of the month recipe day, another day tip day, another day exercise day.   

Plus share your thoughts by reblogging this post and commenting or putting something on our ask box.  We’ll do whatever the community likes best!

~PositivelyPersistentTeach

Checking In

Teacher Dare Day is a successful recurring feature in the Tumblr teaching community. I wanted to suggest another possible recurring feature for us.

I’m a member of a teaching fellowship cohort, and we have an online thread that members can update called “Soundbites: Highs and Lows,” where fellows post one part of their life (teaching or personal) that is making them happy and one challenge that they’re struggling with. It’s been a great way to build community and to find support with other educators.

Now that the school year is well and truly underway, I thought our Tumblr community might benefit from an occasional “check-in.”  Just like the community declares Teacher Dare Days once every couple of weeks, we could have a Check-In Day once every couple of weeks to prompt people to post a recent success and a recent struggle.

It may not be something we need, but it was something I was thinking about.

*PPT notes: I think this is a fabulous idea, and would be happy to post the Check In Calls.  If you have any other ideas that could help build this community and allow us to support each other please free to message us!