Week+4


 * Monday to Thursday**

Not much has been going on this week. On Monday I created a Student Needs Assessment. I just went through and searched for different student technology surveys and borrowed different questions that I thought were good to my own survey. I really like using Google Docs to make surveys. It is so easy and FREE! I had tried to create surveys through Polldaddy and Survey Monkey but the free versions only let you have a certain amount of responses. I needed quite a few more than 100. We are planning on surveying almost 400 students. We should be able to get a pretty good idea where the entire school is at once we survey these students. There will be responses from Contemporary, College Prep, and Honors classes; as well as all walks of life. I cannot wait to see the results.

On Tuesday we went to Columbus for our Coaches meeting. We got some really good ideas and were able to compare where we were to compared to other schools. I did not realize how many groups had problems within their groups. I assummed since we were receive such a large amount of money everyone would be on board and participating. Guess that is not the case. Well we all know what happens when one assumes. ;-) Some of the things I took from the conference: We do not have to have complete control all of the time, students are here to learn not hear us talk about stuff, our wait time we think is long is too short, have students create the senteo questions, have students create google docs to report on how they are progressing in their book, and let the students explore how to solve problems we do not have to spoon feed them. Overall, I thought it was a great meeting and can't wait to hear more great I deas next month.

Wednesday was pretty unproductive. I had finally got our presentation about the intentions of the grant and what the coach is, when a team member suggested that we change the format of the presentation. She suggested either a Prezi or a video like we have been watching on YouTube. Well that deflated the thought that was presentation was good so I started creating a movie on MovieMaker. It did help that my program crashed three times during the process of creating the video but I got it finished. I am pretty proud of what I have right now. There is no music yet because I needed a consult on what is copyright appropriate. So I asked our music teacher at the middle school and he said he would find some good music to add to it. I'll post the movie when I get it finished. I am pretty proud of it and will possibly post it to TeacherTube.

Today has been trying. I have been trying to get the classes set up for the CPSs. I can usually extract the info from ProgressBook and just split up the classes. However, the one I wanted to do that for did not have the correct extraction info so I had to type each student and their ID number by hand. Wow did that suck. I am glad I have not had to do that it except for only this teacher. In additon, I have been emailing the 8th Grade Algebra I Honors teacher about having his tsudents break into groups to create a set of help VodCasts for the regular Algebra I students at the high school. I think these would really help our students. Peer instruction is awesome.