At Open House in my school district I have 7 minutes to explain my class to the parents before the next class comes in. I was always afraid to forget something crucial so a couple years ago I took photos throughout the year and then created an Open House Video. Every year I tweak it slightly but this is the video I showed last year. I also post it on my school website so parents or guardians who could not attend can still watch the video. originally posted on ballinwithballing.blogspot.com

Or should I title this: "What could be learned from Online Teaching"? I'd like to give you a glimpse into my online classroom and real life classroom.     I started teaching 16 years ago and taught in a very traditional way for most of that time. I did incorporate cooperative learning and group projects here or there but for the most part I did a traditional lecture from the overhead projector because that was the most efficient way to cover/teach the material. In 2007 I made the transition from the overhead projector to a SmartBoard (interactive white board). This allowed me to use some interactive games with my students but only one student at a time could come up to the board and play the game. Often the students did not want to get up in front of their peers and look foolish as they were playing the game so that was only slightly useful. In  January 2010 I attended a three day Moodle workshop at our local Erie 1 BOC ES ( Boards of Cooperative Educational Ser

     This year I have been going crazy with eDoctrina. For those of you who haven't heard of eDoctrina before, I blogged about it here , but in a nutshell it is a data management system that was locally created in the Buffalo, NY area and I can see it being the next great tool in education.      In the past teachers have been able to get item by item feedback about a test question by using scan forms such as Scantron and we have been able to see end of the year data correlated to the State Standards but that was it.  With eDoctrina the teacher can get feedback about each student individually, each class, each test or quiz question, all linked to the standards. I am a nut for data and helping my students so I am definitely hooked on this program.      Don't get me wrong, this doesn't do the work for you. It still requires a LOT of work upfront on the part of the teacher but once the bulk of the work is put in, it is ready to use in future years and teachers can share wi

     Here's another great idea that I found on Pinterest .       Every year at this time I'm looking for an easy craft so the boys can make christmas presents for their teachers.  The true challenge is finding something that they can make (with a little help of course) and something that isn't too expensive because we like to include all of their teachers including the art, music, and phys. ed teachers, etc.  Overall, we came up with 15 teachers that we needed gifts for.      The original posting of this craft that I saw was on the blog: Eyeballs By Day, Crafts By Night      Here is how we made the ornaments      We used Fimo soft to make the carrots.      Make sure that you buy the "SOFT" because the regular is very hard for little hands to manipulate.      The boys made the carrots and Princess Leia helped (well, she wanted to)      We put the carrots on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and put t

     Often in a high school classroom students are sitting. Six and a half hours of sitting with small 5 minute bursts of exercise to get from class to class. I don't know about you but it makes my rear end hurt just thinking about it. So whatever I can do to get my students up and walking around I do it. It keeps the kinesthetic learners more engaged and the students love interacting with one another. I'm fortunate to teach biology which lends itself to laboratory activities and hands on activities that really get all students engaged. One such lab is The Tree Maze (from the Arbor Day Foundation). Here is a link to the lab: http://www.arborday.org/kids/TreemazeFINAL.pdf In the lab it gives you a "walking dichotomous key" which are full sheets of paper that you tape up around the room. You could bring in tree branches for the students to use but I instead printed and laminated cards with pictures of the leaves, bark, seeds, etc of various trees for