Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

Shattering the Perfect Teacher Myth by @aaron_hogan During the school year, one thing that goes by the wayside is reading for fun. I love to read but its not always compatible with my exhaustion and lack of free time so my summers include a decent amount of reading. One book I chose was Shattering the Perfect Teacher Myth by Aaron Hogan . Besides seeing my Twitter PLN raving about it, it also falls in line with the whole purpose of my blog; embracing all imperfections and failures that occur. Despite the advice at the beginning of the book, I read through it in one sitting. But I didn't have a choice; it was so incredibly relatable and intriguing. Aaron Hogan brings up so many truths that go against go against every myth that I have been guilty of believing and he offers numerous ideas and suggestions to embed these truths into your mindset and classroom. But because I ignored Hogan's advice to read through the book at a methodical pace, I most likely missed out on some ...

During the first class I took to become a teacher, the professor took half of the class out and informed us that after four years of teaching half us of will have left teaching all together. Now I'm well into my fourth year and I'm still standing. In fact, I feel that this year is going to be... For starters, I have officially started my Master's in Educational Technology. I'm only a few weeks in and, while I'm overwhelmed and stressed, I'm glad that I'm finally taking the next steps in my education. It also helps that one of my amazing friends is doing it with me! I'm also blessed to be going into my second year at Minarets High School, which continues to be my dream school. As many people said, the first year was me trying to drink out of a fire hose, but now I feel confident and ready to be 100% PBL in a 21st century school. Over the summer, I participated in the EdtechTeam's Teacher Leader Certification and becoming inspired to set new g...

If I learned anything from ISTE, its that caffeine is an absolute necessary. With so many activities, sessions, social events, and adrenaline, I needed coffee to stay alert and focused so that I could absorb as much learning as necessary. Here are some of my final takeaways from #ISTE2016: No matter your expertise, there is always something new to learn . During Glenn Wiebe 's session about Google Tools in the Social Science, I learned about  Google Public Data , a resource that gathers public data into one place;  Google Arts and Culture , a collection of resources from around the world; and  Chronicling America , a collection of US newspapers from the Library of Congress. Wiebe even walked us through a lesson where we determined the relationship between three separate images by utilizing Google Streetview and Google Public data; this ended up being an excellent example of push and pull factors that lead to migration. What I loved about this session is that...

The Cold War: a complex event that lasted over forty years with a wide variety of players and foreign policies. An event that has lasting-effects that we still witness and experience. So as a teacher with the school year coming to an end, I was torn on how to cover such a complicated event with one project. The year before I would have just lectured about the Cold War, which was easy for me and painful for the kids. Besides, nowadays "if we have an Internet connection, we have fingertip, on-demand access to an amazing library that holds close to the sum of human knowledge," as said by Will Richardson in Why School?  So obviously that wasn't a viable option. But how could I expose students to the variety of events in the Cold War without just telling them all about. Of course, I started doing research on ways other #pbl teachers have used the Cold War, but either I wasn't inspired by the project or I had already done something similar with another project. I sea...

Twitter is by far my favorite social media app. It has opened up so many opportunities for me and has given me so many amazing connections with educators all over the world. I've always wanted to integrate into my classroom for student use, but, due to my former school's policies, I could not. With my employment at Minarets, I was finally given the opportunity to do it, but -- I'm embarrassed to admit -- it took me nine months to finally get my students to use Twitter. As always, the possibility of failure made me hesitant to even try implementing Twitter into my classroom. I came up with so many excuses and reasons for why I couldn't do it: I'm still adjusting to Minarets and I don't have time to focus on Twitter on top of everything else. Well the students are blogging so that will get them connected to other people. I don't want to expose students to another way to bully or harass each other. I like my job too much to risk it for Twitter assignments. ...

If you follow me on Twitter , then I'm sure that you are well aware that I attend the National CUE Conference in Palm Springs last week (#CUE16). I've been a member of CUE for the last two years and attended conferences and edcamps put on by its affiliate in the Central Valley, but this was the first time that I ever attended one of its national events. Representing Minarets at #cue16 :) #minaretsrocks #Mustangpride pic.twitter.com/530iMrN0Yd — Kaitlin Morgan (@missmorgan810) March 17, 2016 To put it simply, #cue16 was like the CVCUE Conferences and GAFE Summits that I have attended, but on steroids. Everyone was there for the same reasons: to learn new tools and techniques for the classroom, to network and collaborate with fellow teachers, and to share their excitement and enthusiasm for edtech, teaching, and learning. I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little nervous that I would be lonely since I was the only one attending from my school, but these shared inte...

Presentations are synonymous with teaching, especially during the NCLB era when I got my teaching credential. Without question, PowerPoint was an unspoken tool that every teacher needed to be competent in. So naturally I used PowerPoint all the time for my direct instruction. During my student teaching, however, I began to get bored with PowerPoint. My presentations seemed repetitive and boring to me, which  would mean it was incredibly boring for my students. I started desperately looking around for new templates, themes, backgrounds, anything that would jazz up my PowerPoints. Around that time, I had a classmate use this interesting presentation tool that was so fascinating. It would zoom in and out then flow from slide to slide. In all honesty, the information itself wasn't that interesting, but I was engaged because I wanted to see what would happen next. At the end of class, I found that it was Prezi . I forced myself to learn how to use it and tried using it a few times for...