Going Zero Base

Lots of meeting this week, I had a staff meeting yesterday about my schools alternative governance choices. We have opted to go zero base and I will be reapplying for my job sometime in the near future.I know that I want to stay at my school, not only because I enjoy my current classroom but because I think my school has a great deal of potential and all it needs is a push in the right direction. Time will tell if going zero base is a positive or negative push. Several of my colleagues are pretty shaken up about the whole process but we have been talking about it since September so I am not sure why they are so 'surprised'. I have come to the conclusion that if you want something bad enough occasionally you are going to have to fight for. I do not want to leave my school so I am more than willing to prove why I am a valuable asset. All in all I think that this has the potential to be a breath of fresh air and to help shake up some of the "entrenched" teachers.

The rest of my week will be dominated by a professional development that I am leading. My principal wanted me to provide training to the teachers about two of our new online resources and I figured if I offered three different days to attend it would result in more teachers attending and less excuses/no shows. Hopefully today is not an indication of things to come. I only had four teachers in attendance.The two new online resources are IXL and PD360. IXL is an online math set of activities paired to the Maryland state standards. Each teacher creates a roster of their students allowing them to sign into the website. This allows the teacher to track TONS of data about what the students are working on, how many skills they are mastering or need more work on. The site generates detailed reports for teachers to highlight troublesome areas to reinforce during normal instruction. The students are able to do the activities anywhere they have an internet connection which means they can work at home. To help motivate the students they will be earning "rewards" on the web site for meeting various criteria like how many problems they have solved or how long they have been online. The rewards are posted in a sort of digital stamp book of pictures that they can print. PD360 is our schools new on demand professional development video database and teacher forum to help us take control of our own professional development. The teachers at today's session were very excited about IXL once I started showing them all of the features. Now I just have to find a way to entice more teachers for the next two sessions.

Things are going well in class with my students, My younger classes are amazed by the laser printer that suddenly has come to life in our classroom. The Reading Blaster software allows the students to find various coloring pages and treasure pages that can be printed to color as a reward for doing well on the reading activities. I allow the students to each print one page each time we have class for free and if they want they can print more pages for one lion loot per page. Lion loot is given out by all teachers as a positive reward system. The teachers have been telling me that the students are so excited to share their pages that they printed from class when they get back to their rooms. NetSupport School is making my job easier by limiting students ability to just hit print over and over again. It sends their print request to my workstation so that I can approve or deny. This is handy since every time a student presses the print button in the game it instantly tries to send a copy to the default printer.