... It's Back To School Time!

It's that time of year again... I officially start school on MONDAY! I can't believe it's August. I know a lot of other states start school much later -- even after Labor Day -- but we start early in the south and are out of school by Memorial Day! I love not having school in June!

I have been itching to get back to work all week. I know, I should be relaxing by a pool, enjoying my final hours of relaxation... but I just have so many ideas on my mind that I just want to get started! I actually did a lot of "fun" stuff this week to get ready for school! During the school year, I don't normally have a lot of time to play with new webtools and try out new things. I've had all summer to let a few ideas percolate, so I was more than ready to put them on paper and get them ready for school.

I know a lot of teachers that start every class with a bell-ringer or warm-up problem. I have started class with practice problems when we are working on math concepts, but I'm not very good at making it a part of the daily routine in class. I feel like this is a missed opportunity, but could never find a system that I felt was meaningful for both me and the students.

I saw this pin on Pinterest, and started thinking. I loved the way that system has students evaluate their learning on their way out the door. But did I really want to look through them every day? Would I have time to do that? I know that if it was every day I wouldn't stick with it... but maybe I could do once a week... That seems much more reasonable. My plan was to give students a half-sheet of paper and hold them responsible for having it all week (and have a way for them to make it up if they miss class or lose it...) and on Friday, when they finish their warm-up, they can turn it in to whichever folder represents how they feel about that weeks content. This idea is still a work in progress! I will post an update when I have it all figured out!

The Creative Classroom had a similar idea, but with bins. I love the wording of these!

Some teachers have a clear way to write their lesson plans. Some teachers buy the same lesson plan book each year or print off their own. Personally, I have never found a system that really worked for me. I've tried printing them off and keeping them in a binder, but the binder I had was too bulky and I didn't like carrying it home or to meetings. I'm trying a new system this year, and I'm pretty excited about it! It's called Planboard. It's a free online lesson planner.

Favorite things:
1. Set your schedule/classes and there are many, many schedule variations for the schools with A/B days or different Thursdays...
2. Keeps plans from previous years
3. Day/Week/Monthly Views

This is what the Day View looks like:

I love how clean it is. It has a "notepad" area for notes for that day. For each lesson, you can attach files to easily find them (I probably won't use this feature) and you can attach standards! You can attach a set of standards to each course and it will track your standard progress throughout the year. I love this feature! This is something that is so time consuming for me to do on paper, but when it's online it should be much easier!

This system is all about sticking to it, so I'm going to try use it diligently and I will let you know my thoughts once the school year gets rolling.

To celebrate the start of school, I'm throwing a sale in my TpT Store AND there is a site-wide TpT sale going on too! Such a great time to find those new resources for school!

How are other teachers feeling about going back to school?

... I Discovered Piktochart!

I love going to PD sessions, especially in the summer. This summer, I was part of a resource development team. Luckily, all of the team members got along extremely well. When the time came for our last meeting of the summer, we really did have so much fun. The best part of the team is that we all had extremely different talents and perspectives which allowed us to come up with some very creative lessons and activities.

The best part about that last PD session was the technology focus. For me, I was the technology guru in the group. I love finding new websites to play with, new online project ideas for students, and new ways to make existing lessons more engaging. During the PD, we were shown a resource to A MILLION (okay, not a million... but a lot!) of online resources targeted at different teaching strategies, such as assessment, classroom management, or vocabulary. We had time in the meeting to play around with a few. I was able to go through the lists pretty quickly, since many of them I had used before or at least heard of and had an idea of what they did. I took my time to explore new ones that I had never seen. There were a couple of really good ones that I have added to our class Symbaloo for future projects and assignments. And then there was one that I became obsessed with and spent the night playing with...

Piktochart. 

It is advertised as being a website to create your own infographics. That was cool enough for me to at least check it out. I find infographics eye catching and interesting, even if they are about something as mundane as the composition of dust, or the statisitics of doing laundry. They are just pretty, and have cool layouts, and all these fun facts... 

If I could somehow combine that engagement I feel when looking at them with something in class, it must be a win... but I'm not a graphic designer. I was not born with that artistic gene, so perhaps I was getting into something that I really didn't know anything about... oh well, worth a shot.. 

I sign up for free, and see that there are templates I can try out either as an infographic (which is a long continuous page, not ideal for printing out), a report (which prints well on A4, which I found out is printer paper... DING DING!), a banner, or a presentation. Honestly I ignored the last two when I looked at report. I picked a pretty template... then realized I'd likely want to print them out in black and white, so a colored background was not condusive... and chose a different template with a light background instead. 

The editing layout online is pretty straight forward. You can delete or edit everything from the template. I chose a few details, but deleted almost everything else. You can delete the extra pages too if you don't need them. There is a toolbar on the side with options for graphics, text, background, tools... Seems like everything you need is there. 

It was surprisingly easy to work with. They provide lots of guide-lines to help you line everything up in a pretty way. There is a shockingly nice array of fonts to pick from. There are photoframes and textframes you can customize to really personalize things. I had so much fun playing around with the layout, font combinations, and paging through the icons (there is actually a huge variety here -- many of which you can change the colors of, which is a plus). 

So why even bother playing with all this? What in the world could that be useful for? 

My original thought was to use them as handouts or reference pages. There are a lot of topics that come up at the beginning of the year that students need to remember all year long. I started with those topics -- CER Writing, Metric Conversions, Graphing, Significant Figures... 

I started working on my class period websites today, and realized that they would be perfect for making a reference section on the website. After creating them, you can download them as .png or .jpeg files, which make them super easy to embed online. This also meant that future pages could be done with more color if I'm going to post them only online. I'm thinking of making a class rules/procedures one to post online. I could even email it to parents then too, which would be great I think. 

All of the ones I have made so far can be found on my TpT store as FREE items! What teacher doesn't love freebies?

I need fuel for my current obsession. What other topics would this be great for? 

.. We are Loving Skyforge!

We are often looking for new games to play -- specifically MMO's (massively multiplayer online games). Occasionally there is a new game that comes out that we play for a few weeks, maybe get to level cap, and then inevitably go back to World of Warcraft. In reality, World of Warcraft gets pretty boring after a while and turns into a huge time sink when you're waiting for queues.

Luckily, the husband reads lots of things on the newest games being released and heard about Skyforge several months ago when it went into Closed Beta for testing. We looked into it and decided to buy early access passes for Open Beta and were able to start playing a week earlier than the general public -- woot!

So far we love this game! Five Reasons Why:
1. Completely FREE to play
2. One Character, No Alts!
3. Immersive Combat
4. Endless Things to Do
5. Complex Talent, Ability, and Class Systems

The story of the game revolves around an immortal on the path to becoming a god in a sci-fi feeling world. Setting feels like Star Wars, which is awesome. The game has depth and complexities to it, unlike a lot of MMOs that are getting more and more simplistic in terms of stats. and talents. My favorite part? No Alts! Every single class can be unlocked on ONE character. You can change class anytime you are out of combat -- no special NPC requried.

Character at 4k Prestige

The combat feels like Tera -- Real-time, aiming system, active dodging. The abilities are complex and involve many different buffs and debuffs, modifiers, and dots. Talents offer a variety of different build possibilities. Abilities and talents are earned through the atlas system over time. More on that later.

The game is a combination of open-world and instanced adventures. The main storyline quest leads you to these different options. The open-world zones are very large and offer lots of quest chains for various rewards. The instanced adventures can be done with 1-3 players, making this game versatile and great for duo-ing, like my husband and I prefer. There are also 5-player dungeons, free-for-all PVP battles, and 3v3, 6v6, and 10v10 PVP battles to choose from. A lot of variety available.

The adventures, regions, and pvp offer a variety of awards, mainly Sparks, Supplies, Gear, and Credits. Credits are the in-game currency used to do things like upgrade gear slots and buy bag space. Gear slots consist of main hand and off hand weapon, four amulets, and four rings.

Unlike most MMOs, you do not earn levels from these adventures, but rather prestige. Every single piece of gear, talent node, ability node increases your prestige. Every single thing you do in the game is to increase your prestige. There is no prestige cap, although the real end-game begins at 30,000 prestige. I hit 4k prestige in about a week, to give that a little perspective.

The Ascension Atlas

Sparks of Insight and Class Sparks are used to enhance stats and  unlock classes. The tree is overwhelming at first and similar to games like Path of Exile. You can spend your Sparks of Insight at different nodes along the path to unlock stats and talents to enhance all of your classes, and eventually unlock additional classes. In the picture above, the golden line is the path I have already completed and the dotted blue line is my chosen path. The large white node is the Slayer class that I had almost unlocked at that point. You can unlock as many or as few classes as you choose. There is no way to "mess up" your atlas since every node offers benefit to whichever class you end up playing. It's a fantastic system. May be overwhelming at first, but simply reading the nodes when its unlocked will help you understand it much better.

Kinetic Atlas

In addition to the Ascension Atlas that has all of the classes, each class also has their own specific atlas. Class Sparks are spent here to earn talents and abilities for that class. The more you play a certain class, the more sparks you can earn for that class, and the more abilities and talents you will have.

In addition to all of the above, there is also an Order system (similar to followers in Star Wars: The Old Republic or garrisons in World of Warcraft) and Pantheons (like guilds, with GvG like Aion) that further provide things to do and progress. I will write more on these later.

I will be writing more about this game as time goes on, since I have mentioned it has depth and complexities. The game is FREE, less than 10gigs, and completely worth trying out if you enjoy MMOs.

... I Do Homework Too!

I don't know about you, but I don't give tons of homework! Perhaps I'm crazy, perhaps this is brilliant -- I have no idea.

I've posted about homework before, but in case you haven't read that past post (though you should!) if I assign homework, I typically portion out part of the following day to go over the homework together especially if it is a math intensive homework like many of the chemistry ones are. 

When this is the case, I get to do homework too! Hooray! 

Practicing Stoichiometry

I'm not sure if this is because I'm a newbie teacher still, but when I assign several problems, I work through them, showing my work, just like I would expect my students to do. Why?

1. Easy Reference

I can easily see how to work through the problem so when I go to write it on the board, I can make sure its easy-to-read and organized. 

2. Pinpoint Trouble Problems

There always seems to be a tricky problem hidden within an otherwise straight forward assignment. The only way to remember and spot them is to do them yourself. If I'm spot checking homework, or looking for practice problems, I choose these problems first to see if students were able to handle them. 

3. Answer Keys for Students

During certain units, I will give students multiple sheets of practice problems to work on in class at their own pace, with a partner, or in groups. Since they can start and work on whichever problems they wish, I like to have an answer key available for them to check their work. I always show my work the way I expect students to show their work. When they check their answer and have the incorrect answer, they know to go back and find what they did wrong. I feel like this is silently reinforcing the reason for why they have to show their work (even though I mention it continuously). 

4. Extra Practice!

Some concepts get rusty when you wait an entire year between teaching them (gas laws anyone?). Doing the homework helps to remind my brain of how to work out the problems. I will be the first to admit that I have  made many mistakes while working through practice problems in front of class, but doing the homework ahead of time at least minimizes some of them. It's always good to brush up on skills! 

Do my other fellow teachers also do homework? How to you brush up on your skills and target tricky problems?

...I Love Cooking!

Up to this point, this blog has mostly focused on teaching and sharing resources -- things like that. Believe it or not, I do enjoy doing other things (hopefully this isn't shocking to most of you...). I figured, why not share that realm of my life on here with you all?

Currently, I have a stay-at-home hubby and I teach during the week. He does a good job of staying on top of things at home like the dishes and running errands. There are two things he will not (cannot?) do: laundry and cooking.

Chicken and Spinach Gnocchi Soup

I do think anyone really likes to do laundry, so I put up with it on the weekends. I do however love cooking. He doesn't understand and feels bad about me cooking dinner after a day of work, but for me, it is relaxing and a creative outlet. I love tending a pot on the stove trying to perfectly season a pasta dish or exploring my spice cupboard to figure out a new variation of baked chicken. I won't say that everything I create is delicious, but I do a pretty good job most of the time.

There was one incident in which I accidentally double salted my chicken -- once in the marinade and once in the breading. It was disastrous. The husband looked at me horrified when he tasted it. I think that is the only thing I've made that he couldn't take more than one bite of...

Almond Pound Cake with Orange Glaze

I also love baking, a talent I share with both my coworkers and my students from time to time. Occasionally I will reward students who get A's on particularly hard tests with a homemade cookie. Their personal favorites seem to be cookies-n-cream cookies and double chocolate peppermint cookies. I leave a few at home for the husband and I and give the rest to my coworkers, who rarely seem to turn me down. They are pretty delicious.

I would love to share some recipes and cooking tips with you all! Any special requests?

... How I Met My Husband

My husband and I met in a slightly unconventional way and some people are shocked to hear the story.

I met my husband online, through World of Warcraft. 

Let's start at the very beginning... 

I started playing World of Warcraft when I first moved away to college. One of my high school friends convinced me to play with him as a way for us to "hang out" even though we were hours apart from each other. For those of you who don't know, World of Warcraft is an online game with thousands (millions?) of players who each play a character and can interact with each other within the world. I could take my character, meet my friends character, and run off and kill monsters with each other. We can chat with each other, or use a voice chat program like Skype, Ventrilo, or Mumble to talk to each other while playing. It was an awesome way to spend my weekends in college when my roommate went home to visit her friends and family and I was in my dorm alone. Helped with some of the homesickness for sure!

Raid Group; My Warrior (Loralae)

I played the game all the way through college, and by the time I was a junior I was getting pretty competitive in the game and played with a 25 person group at scheduled times several times a week. Because you play with the same people a lot, you really get to know each other and often times we would talk to each other and play outside of those scheduled times too. One of the people I played with invited me to get into voice chat with him and some of his friends to "hang out" in the game. My future husband happened to be in the voice chat too!

We hit it off immediately and began chatting on a regular basis. We exchanged phone numbers so we could text each other during the day. Eventually we were talking on Skype all night long, even as I was studying or working on homework. I made plans to visit him during fall break my senior year. We spent that Christmas together, he came to my college graduation... and the rest is history! 

This is quite a confession for me. Most of the time when people ask how we met, I just say we met online. Some people probably think its crazy to meet in a computer game, but its actually pretty common. The best part about it is that we automatically had something in common -- we both loved to play World of Warcraft. 

We have been together for five years now, and we both still play, although not as much as we used to because of other responsibilities. We have always set our computers up right next to each other so we can play together. Sometimes we will watch a movie or watch T.V. as we play, or one of us will be playing while the other is working on something else. We are able to talk to each other and discuss happenings in the game -- believe it or not there is a lot of drama sometimes! -- and are able to connect with each other even though we are playing in a virtual world. Those who don't play will likely not believe or understand it, but it works for us. 

We have expanded our horizons a bit since we first met. We no longer play just World of Warcraft, but also other Blizzard games (Diablo, Heroes of the Storm, and Hearthstone), other mmo's (Aion, Rift, Wildstar), and other computer games (League of Legends, Flyff). We have had several video game consoles, but never played on them much. 

We are forunate enough to have several "couple" friends to play games with also! We play World of Warcraft with them, but we also get together for game night periodically and play a variety of strategy board games. This is a whole different type of gaming, but involves a lot of the same tactics that we are used to playing. We play board games that involve thought, planning, and strategy -- more than what is required in your average Monopoly or Scrabble game. Some of our favorites are Nuns on the Run, Smallworld, Lords of Waterdeep, and Smash Up. 

Shadows over Camelot; Settlers of Catan; Lords of Waterdeep

What types of games do you guys play? Does anyone love relaxing with an mmo like we do?

... Teachers Don't All Get the Summer Off!

I officially have less than one month until I have to go back to school and this summer has flown by! Luckily, I was able to spend a couple of weeks traveling and visiting family, but the majority of my summer was actually spent working really hard on things for next year. Just because I don't have students sitting in my classroom, doesn't mean that I'm just loafing on the beach for three months! 

I'm sure most other teachers you talk to are in the exact same boat. I am not complaining by any means, since I have been able to schedule around the work I need to do and do some things at my own pace, but I have been busy! Here are a few things that have taken up a lot of my summer time: 

Staff Development: We are fortunate enough to have some summer planning and staff development within our content areas. Over the course of two weeks, I spent six work days at school with my fellow teachers of Biology and Chemistry planning out things for next year. We wrote some tests, planned some labs, made some improvements to our online classrooms, and were able to brainstorm, collaborate, and plan for next year. I really think this work will pay off when we see each other again in the fall. It also gave me a short to-do list of things to accomplish before heading back in August. These are things I can do on my own time when the bright ideas happen to strike me (anyone else have this? 10 pm lesson planning because you had an amazing idea?).

Intervention Courses: I taught a science intervention course for one week at another high school in the district. This is different from summer school -- the content is very narrow and specific and only students who have no other options for graduation were in the class. The classes are small and taught with another teacher, but the class met for 4 hours every day for a week with a long test on the final day. It is very intense -- both for me and for the students -- but the students are very well behaved and try very hard since they know it is their very last shot at graduating. I love teaching this -- so rewarding! 

Resource Development: The district I teach in is extremely large and every summer teachers from the major content areas meet and develop some common resources to provide for district teachers for the school year. This year I was chosen to develop Chemistry resource with two other chemistry teachers from other schools. We had a huge list of tasks to complete by our July deadline -- everything from writing essential questions and reviewing the standards to creating writing prompts and assessments. The three of us divided up the work and met several times to make sure we were all on the same page. This was by far the largest undertaking for the summer, but after tonight I only have one more of my assigned tasks to finish! 

The last major thing I want to accomplish is to fill up my Teachers Pay Teachers store for the next school year! I have resources to update and new units, labs, and activities to upload. Make sure to check my store for new products to be posted and an upcoming start-of-school sale! 

Ideas for products you would love to see? Leave a comment below to let me know! 

Although I have been busy, I have enjoyed working on everything. I feel like the information and ideas will already be flowing when school starts in August. That is a great feeling for me!