Brooke-Lynn's Blog

For the last three weeks of radio silence, I've been in the field, teaching sixth graders in my local school district. It has been an awesomely meaningful experience, as tiring as seven hours of eleven-year-olds can be. During this time, the students have been my focus and I have spent a lot of my time outside of the classroom reflecting on the occurrences of the day. Although I only completed eight days in the field, I learned a lot about the realities of teaching. My cooperating teacher has been a wealth of information, and our teaching styles are very similar. Nonetheless, I have also been exploring online resources to improve the teaching I have been doing. As a part of an assignment in which my classmates and I reached out to our former teachers, we requested resources from these educators. Many of these were useful in informing issues I ran into while in the field. Emily at Teacher, Teach Me How to Teach!  recommended Edutopia , a website bursting with information and advic

Last Friday, I attended the Association of Computer Technology Educators of Maine (ACTEM) conference. I had been preparing for this conference for almost a month, so I went into it confident in my work and expecting a positive experience. (After I finally woke up, having left campus before six in the morning). As expected, I came out of the conference with new ideas and resources for my unit and for teaching in general. I received many recommendations for tech, many of which I will be looking into for future unit planning, and a couple I may use in the unit I am currently building. These are things I might never have even thought to look for without these recommendations. I'm looking forward to integrating some of the resources, especially the add-ons to Google Suite apps, which I think will prove to be effective formative assessment tools. The sharing of resources is one of the most practically beneficial aspects of collaboration and I was glad to have been introduced to a wide

For those of you that don't know, I am currently building a unit for an English literature class for the first time. There are a lot of things I am trying to take into consideration with it, so I'm constantly altering in little (or big) ways. Right now, I'm pretty confident in my unit sketch, which encompasses a number of standards and learning experiences. For the purposes of my classes, I have focused primarily on three major assessments for the unit. Recently, I made a Padlet to express these assessments using images of displays from MoMA and Smithsonian . I approached this as an opportunity to test out Padlet as a potential technology to use in the classroom and I certainly did learn about the program. I was surprised by the MoMA and Smithsonian websites, though. These websites are very well-curated and are a hidden gem of a resource. The display can be used in a way similar to how I used them in this Padlet, as writing prompts, or for a multitude of other uses in an

If there is one thing building a unit has taught me, it's that the seemingly easy things can take a long time for a perfectionist (i.e. me). Finding a rubric is perhaps the strongest example of this, considering I have spent way more time on this than should have been necessary, even though I had initially counted it as a simple 30-minute undertaking. In my research, I found a lot of rubrics that I thought were okay, none that I thought were truly awful, none I found perfect, and, of course, none that fit my unit. As a jumping off point, I decided to look at rubrics for essays. As an aspiring English teacher, I figure essays will be an unavoidable part of each and all of my classes. Along the way, I also found the Teachers Pay Teachers website, which will likely see a lot of use from me. Even if you're not looking to buy resources, it can be a great source of ideas and inspiration (and some free stuff, as well). The first rubric I found had some positive aspects but was no

Reproduced by permission of the publisher, © 2012 by tpack.org In eighth grade, my English teacher assigned a project on fairy tales. We all read multiple interpretations of Cinderella and examined the common motifs as a class. We were then required to choose a junior fiction or young adult novel that was characterized as a modern retelling. My teacher had put out a table of books organized by the fairy tale or folk tale on which they were based. Each student was then responsible for reading their chosen retelling as well as three children's books from different cultures. From these adaptations, the student found common motifs (at least six) and applied them to each story. The proof we provided for that application was a table on Google Docs. We were also required to create a project on the book we read from a list of options. This project was a favorite of many students and it taught us how to find commonalities between texts, identify motifs, and express our thoughts on a

The Extraordinaires Design Set is a collection of character and "think" cards. The activity we did in class was a lesson in both GRASPS and differentiation. The underlying message of the activity is to look deeper. At first, we were required to look only at the front of the card. The front of each card presented an archetype of sorts; a character rather than a person. There are observations to be made, but they are primarily surface-level. The potential product we designed for that person is different than that we might design once we knew more about their life, as we were required to do, per the "think" cards. As the back is also only images, there is still only so much to be learned, but four images provide much more information than a single image. Thus, our understanding of the character's needs is expanded. Once there are four students, the planning becomes even more difficult. This is an important lesson to keep in mind as we go into the field and, late