Friday, August 26, 2016

I had a good couple of days

I have been in my new position with my new school for about 6 weeks now. Each day has reinforced that I made the right decision and reminded me of how fortunate I am that the district felt that I would be a good fit with their organization. There were some things that happened this week that reminded me why I love what I do.

Monday: This was the first #ILEdChat for the 2016-2017 school year. We have new team members to the chat team and they are a great addition. We have really started to gel as a group and working collaboratively to make the chat the best possible for this school year. We had a great opening to the chat with the timely topic of forming meaningful relationships with students. It was great to see new faces participation in the chat and seeing our regular participants back for another year. It is great exchange of ideas and really invigorates me for the week. You can look at the archive of the chat here.

Thursday: I jumped into a few random chats that caught my eye on Twitter. I was able to learn and share in #3rdChat and #GlobalEdChat . With all of my experience in high schools, the #3rdchat really opened my eyes to the wonderful and mysterious world that is elementary school. I found it important to take a look at this because I have 2 boys who are in the primary grades and the more I can learn about the pedagogy and instruction for the younger grades, the better.

With the #GlobalEdChat, I am amazed at the connectivity that I have through Twitter and yet how limited, globally, I am in my connections. The idea that technology can connect people across oceans, cultures, and languages is an idea that needs to be pushed into the mainstream. As a step towards action, I decided to create a quick form that would collect the contact information of educators who would like to connect. While the number of responses was not YET at a large level, in the first few minutes we had people from across the US, and even had educators from Canada and Australia sign up. If you are interested, please sign up here and I will share the spreadsheet with you after sign up.

Friday: Most of my new position, at lease at this time of year, involves working with students schedules and making sure that things work within the school system. Today was different, I had the wonderful opportunity to interact with actual students who had some concerns about the classes they were in. I had a great time helping the students realize that they had the ability to solve the problems in front of them. The students, both of them, came into my office at a level (1(low) - 10 (high)) of wanting to stay in the class and try at 0. When each left, they made positive movement and realized that success in the class was within their influence and they had to power to make it into a reality. I even got to teach a little chemistry, so that made it even better. :)

I also had to opportunity to introduce High 5 Friday to the students here. The concept is simple: See someone in the hallway, offer them a high 5 and watch them smile. It has a 98%+ success rate and hopefully, I will start to get some "regulars" who look forward to getting the high 5 and offering it to other students.

As an added bonus, this is the first football game of the season for my new school and it is a home game! I am excited to see the team participate in the new division and hopefully, bring home the "W".

Overall, another great week. How was yours? Share your great moments from this week and inspire someone to try something new!

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