With our second (well…my first) Face to Face meeting happening this morning, I am actually probably hoping for what many were hankering for before the first scheduled meeting: I’m hoping to meet some of these bloggers and Twitterers (um…what do you call someone who Tweets? Is that even a thing?) that I have been reading about for the past two weeks.

I’m also hoping to take away a few more effective strategies to employ in my teaching practice and to leave feeling freshly inspired and energized after meeting and dialoging with a team of passionate educators.

On a more technical level, I’m hoping to learn how to deal with the spam issue on the blog (is the Akismet key the best way?) and fill in some of the gaps about the process that I might not have picked up on after my first meeting with my school-buddy, Ruth.

I think it was Jan who brought up this question: what next? What are our collective hopes and ideas about what we do with these skills, strategies, and ideas in order to push forward all our school communities? I’ve been sharing some things here and there with my team at school, but I’m also wondering what this practice can do for my larger community. A discussion about this would be pretty incredible, I think.

Looking forward to meeting and plotting with everything shortly!

Weebly is a teacher’s best friend.

Or at the very least, it is my new best friend.

As a new teacher, I am constantly striving to find ways to make my life easier, less complicated, and more sane. I’m not always successful with this pursuit (see the above part about being a new teacher), but one tool has made a significant impact on my, and my students’, lives.

If you have not already experimented with Weebly, I highly recommend it. I’ve made websites on Google and iWeb, but I chose to use Weebly in my classroom because it is so straightforward and simple for students to learn. I am presently teaching grade 6, and without any exaggeration, I allowed the students some time to explore the platform and within 30 minutes of playing around, many of the students feel like empowered experts when creating their own websites.

My students are using this website building tool to create their learning portfolios through the year (more on this later), but my teaching practice has become so much easier by using this tool in my classroom instruction.

My spelling program is inspired by the Words Their Way program and so I have four different spelling groups based on where my students are developmentally. With four different groups, I found at the onset of the year, I was spending excessive amounts of time just reading out words and in the back of my head, I was asking myself “I earned a Masters degree so I could read lists of words out loud? There has to be a better way!”

To solve this problem, I just recorded myself reading the words out loud (I recorded on my phone, but you could also use a computer) and upload the recordings to my own Weebly page. When it is spelling quiz day, my students just log in to my Weebly page (on our iPads, but you could also use computers), plug in their headphones, and complete their quiz. While one small group is completing a quiz, I have now been freed up to teach a small group a mini-lesson, periodically checking in with the quiz takers.

It’s just a little step, and a tiny bit more prep work, but it means that my precious classroom time is more wisely and thoughtfully used. Sometimes it’s the small victories that can make the biggest impact.

I’m excited to be part of The Cohort 21 Network and start learning and sharing about powerful teaching practices in the classroom. I think even by starting to tap in to the resources and tools that already surround us, inspiration, ideas, and possibilities start to take root and blossom.