Project Nexus

This week I attended a three-day conference that was put on by Project Nexus, a federal grant that promotes vertical teaming to help all students move toward taking AP classes. The conference was very informative as they used examples that could be used all the way down in middle school to start preparing students for what they will have to accomplish in the AP classes they might someday take. The theme of the conference was loud and clear: communication, communication, communication. This point was slammed home when, in response to a question about whether we as teachers work with our colleagues in other departments, someone in the room said "I barely get to see all of the teachers in MY department." This only further illustrates how great our technology conference from a couple weeks ago was. The math portion of the conference ended with a superb presentation by a statistics professor from Ithaca College. See if you can solve one of the problems that he stumped us with. What is the pattern? 8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 3, 2, 0. Good luck!

ScribeFire Test

Just checking to see if this works.  I just found a handy little add-on for Firefox called ScribeFire.  It allows you to post to your blog while you are working on the internet without going to your blog's page and interrupting your work.  If this post works then this thing is dynamite.  The one apparent drawback seems to be that it does not support adding pictures directly to your post.  Well I guess you can't have everything.

Science and Math Workshop - Day 4

Four days of tremendous professional development came to and end today. ***sniff, sniff*** We finished up the workshop by listening to Jim Heister describe how to create and implement TI Study Cards in the classroom. Mr. Renkwitz followed with another motivational technology talk and descriptions of ProProfs and Audacity. The coming school year is looking bright with the hope of inspiring more students than I did during my rookie season. There were also some murmurings about a possible trip to Alexandria in August to attend a TI-Nspire workshop. Keep your fingers crossed.

Science and Math Workshop - Day 3

Mr. Renkwitz battled back from a temporary internet outage this morning to show us some interesting material involving blogs and website creation. The website is progressing pretty rapidly now that I have forced myself to move beyond the "early" stages and have given up on perfection. If the creation process keeps up this pace for the rest of the summer I will probably be able to implement a functional smart classroom in time for the start of the coming school year.

"Troubling" Lesson Plan Upload

Lesson Plan

Science and Math Workshop - Day Two

Today was Science day (for the most part) as we got to experiment with CBL's and Logger Pro software. Digital probes hooked up to either a calculator or a computer to take readings and measurements of things that have been traditionally (and painstakingly) taken by hand. It seems like this equipment could go a long way to personalizing the data that Algebra students are asked to manipulate. It would be interesting to see how well they take to it. We were each given the Logger Pro software for our personal computers and some of the things that can be done with it are really astounding. While I was sitting in class I was picturing several former students feverishly plotting points on a video of themselves when they otherwise would have done no work at all.

Science and Math Workshop - Day One

A week long professional development seminar began at CSD today in the areas of Math and Science. About 16 teachers from around the county were on hand to find out that not only would we be educated and paid for the week but we would also be receiving the equipment to make our classrooms "smart." Art Renkwitz began the week's festivities by talking about what we would be getting into during the next four days and also what he hoped we would accomplish with what we learned during the week. Donna Johnson followed up Mr. Renkwitz's presentation with one of her own on the TI-Navigator and how it could be effective in Math and Science classrooms. It seems that the more I learn about the Navigator the more questions I come up with. Such is life, I guess.