New Year

It's the first of the year! In 2 days, I will be back at work and getting ready to the new term.

I'm excited to be teaching 2 sections of Financial Algebra again - I've learned so much the first time around and already have so many thoughts and ideas on how to make it better for the second time. That being said, I'm also finding that I am already overwhelming myself with wanting to create new lessons and repackaging old lessons. The past two weeks, I've spent many hours working on a HyperDoc to familiarize students with Google Suite (suited for High School students) and repackaging a career introduction (skills, interests, and abilities assessments). I think that I have finally got them completed! I'm still working on a document to go into Sheets (since we are doing finance, we use it often and I found the first time around that students had no experience with the application). And, I need to still figure out the details of our first project - career research. We did a different project for this unit, but with the additional time we have, we thought it would be better to really have students research the career they are thinking about since we will use it throughout the year. I'm hoping that I will be able to get them finished by Tuesday, but it isn't looking promising since the other 2 took so long for me to "perfect."

More time than I anticipated has been spent working on a strategy session presentation I volunteered to give. Back in November, I attended SDCUE and a session on HyperDocs. I had heard about them, but I wanted a better understanding. I had implemented a few in my class, and really enjoy the freedom it gives both myself and the students. So, I'm presenting a session about HyperDocs to any teacher that wishes to find out more! I finished my slide deck and thought that I was ready to go. But then I finished reading The HyperDoc Handbook: Digital Lesson Design Using Google Apps by Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis. I felt I could make it better. I thought, if I'm giving a presentation about HyperDocs, wouldn't it be best to example it with them? So I created a Form that could go with the session. I gave opportunities for participants to Explore, Apply, and Reflect. I ask participants to explore already made hyperdocs for their content area. Then I ask for them to include the hyperlink. I will have them apply by really thinking about a lesson they plan to do this spring that maybe they could repackage. Finally, they will reflect on the idea of HyperDocs. In having participants search and include a link to a HyperDoc, I wanted to make sure that information was available for teachers to access, so I created a new Sheet and used the ImportRange function so that only those responses from the form would be visible to anyone that has the link. It's simple, but I'm pretty impressed with myself in pushing this further. My hope is that my colleagues will push themselves so that we all can push the students to achieve more!

Now that I have procrastinated an additional half-hour on the lessons I still need to work on, my resolution for this Spring Term is to Blog at least once a week with some of the resources we are using for Financial Algebra. I think we are doing some awesome stuff, and while we haven't created everything ourselves, it would still be good for me to share what we are doing.

I'm Back!!

After an almost two year hiatus (pregnancy and enjoying time with my wonderful daughter), I decided that I need to start blogging again. I'm hoping that I can post more often than my last go around and offer more insight and resources into my teaching.

As I've spent the summer preparing and planning for the upcoming school year, I felt like there were a lack of resources for the 3 classes I needed to prepare: Integrated Math 1, Financial Algebra, and Senior AVID Seminar. I thought if I was feeling this way, there had to be others out there? So, I'm hoping that by writing about my journey, it may stir additional conversations and offer others a place to gather some ideas. [DISCLAIMER: I am not an expert for these courses]

We are in our third year with Common Core Integrated Math. To be honest, we are really starting our 5th year since we are on a 4x4 schedule. The transition to Common Core and Integrated was tough, not for content but more due to parent and student resistance. I think it was more misunderstanding than anything. Seeing our students go through the 3 courses has been awesome - the level of math they are doing, the conversations they are having, the interest level! The past two years we were using the Mathematics Vision Project. In January, our three District high schools came together to discuss and choose one main resource that we were going to use moving forward (prior to this each school was using a different program). I highlight main resource because it was made clear that this would not be our curriculum; that our curriculum we would develop as we went and that we would have the ability to pull different resources together! Ultimately, we decided to go with CPM (College Preparatory Mathematics) as our main resource as we felt it would be more accessible to all students. While not ecstatic that we would have to change after all the time and effort my department had put in, I knew this decision would be for the best and I was still happy that I would be able to pull in my favorite MVP lessons. So I spent most of the Spring and Summer preparing for our upcoming school year. I've got 7 teachers teaching this course; 4 of them for the first time and 3 of those are brand new to our school (2 totally fresh teachers). It's going to be crazy this Fall. I'm excited at what resources we will be putting together and looking forward to the feedback our team has.

I spent a lot of the 2014-2015 school year working with another teacher in our District to get Financial Algebra as an approved course in our District. I'm a strong supporter of financial literacy in the classroom and wish more required it. At least this course would give a third year course option to our students and get them knowledgeable for the world they are about to enter. Since I was on Maternity Leave for 1/3 of last year, I decided to hold off on offering the course until this year. We got about 140 students signed up to take the class and will be offering 4 sections of it. I'm excited that I will have 2 of the sections and my former student teacher will have 2 of them. We have already spent several hours meeting and trying to figure out how we envision the class, what we want to cover, and how we can make it relevant and applicable to each student. More on this throughout the year!

Finally, I'll also be teaching Senior AVID Seminar. I taught Freshman AVID in the past for 2 years, so I'm excited and nervous about this switch to Seniors. Again, with our 4x4 schedule, curriculum gets crazy. I'm not sure how our school has managed this schedule (I know they have!) so I'm anxious about getting into figuring all that out. I'm also excited since my first set of freshman AVID kiddos are now seniors, so it'll be nice to see where they are now.

I'm planning on making an effort to blog at least once per week with my insights of these three classes. I'll post the resources I can too! I may write about a few other things too - as a BTSA support provider, department chair, sports enthusiast!