Blog - Page 24 of 24 - THOM GIBSON

07 Aug 2013

How I Made A Database of Lesson Ideas With Evernote

I finally downloaded Evernote this past June. I knew it was an organization tool but I wasn't really sure exactly what it did. My goal was to try and solve a few problems I found myself running into as an educator. Resources Everywhere One issue I kept running into as a teacher was having resources all over the place. If I remembered that I saw a great idea for a geography lesson, I didn't remember if I pinned it on Pinterest, read it in an email, favorited it on Twitter, bookmarked the website, saw it on a worksheet, read it…

26 Jul 2013

Diminishing Your Creativity By Reading Too Much?

I've never been much of a reader. I never even wanted to read the GOOD books in high school; I got CliffsNotes for Lord of the Flies. The book was only like 80 pages and the plot even intrigued me, but I just couldn't bring myself to sit and read. Around the time I started college, I began to explore my faith in Christianity further. In addition to the books of the Bible, I actually began to read books on different faith-related topics and would write a written reflection on some of the things I was learning. Unlike reading, journaling…

24 Jul 2013

Exploring the Learn-To-Code Options

I've helped lead the Technology Club for the past two years at my school. The twenty 4th and 5th graders would meet once a week after school for about an hour to work through various tech projects. This past year, we spent time learning how to screencast as well completing a few movie-making projects. Near the end of the school year last year I saw the now famous Code.org video (above) pushing for computer programming education and I thought that our Tech Club would be an awesome avenue to try this out! I began to explore my options. I have…

23 Jul 2013

My Flip That Sort Of Flopped

So last year was my first attempt to 'flip' my classroom. I find myself wanting to kind of avoid the word 'flipped,' not only because I want to be wary of educational fads / GAMECHANGERS! but also because I don't really feel I 'flipped' my classroom, I just provided resources for them to learn online. I've read so many things about different people's experiences from: 'I flipped my classroom and 100% of my students passed or got commended on the end-of-year state assessments' to 'I did it, I liked it, I think it may be a fad and I'm not…

22 Jul 2013

Parent Communication Tech

When I received my teacher evaluation last year, one area that I didn't score as high as anticipated was in the area of parent communication, which sort of confused me. I had BCCed my AP each time I sent out an email to parents, which was fairly frequent. There was the sort of mini-newsletter each week discussing the things we were covering that week, there were the notifications about positive behavior I was seeing in some students, as well as the communiques about any inappropriate behavior that needed to be addressed. But through the midsts of all of that, there…