First Quarter Portfolio Becky Stacey

Reflections – Personal Professional Goals My main goal for this year is to learn to be an effective Robotics teacher for middle school students. During the first quarter, I have worked to learn the basics of building and programming the robots. One of the main challenges of being a technology teacher is that your curriculum is constantly changing, and you have to run to keep up. I would not say that I am where I want to be in terms of my knowledge and expertise in this completely new realm, but I do feel that I have worked hard and made progress, and I have set up an environment in my classes where students are willing to work independently and explore on their own, and share knowledge gained with me and the other students. This has allowed us both to learn.

Reflections – Conference Follow-Up One of the key points that Alan November made in his presentation was that “every classroom is a global community.” I have tried very hard to make my classroom more of a global community than ever before. I have always been a little nervous about allowing the kids to be “out there” on the internet, but I have made a concerted effort to allow them more freedom. In my critical thinking classes, each student has a page on a class wiki, and the wiki is available to be viewed by everyone. I have shared work done by students with parents this way, and have encouraged the students to branch out in their knowledge of the world via the internet. Wiki for 8th grade Critical Thinking Wiki for 7th grade Critical Thinking

Reflections – Extra-Curricular Activities I sponsor National Honor Society. This involves a monthly meeting with officers, another monthly meeting with the full chapter, and monthly beautification work, in addition to fundraising and community outreach. We are trying a new fundraiser this year with Coldstone Creamery. We will participate in the Fall Festival, we have a holiday fundraiser/community outreach planned for December, and a Build-a-Bear outreach project in the Spring. I am a member of PTSO, and attended the meeting on 9/15. My homeroom class assembled a basket for the PTSO silent auction.

Showcase Lesson – Me, Myself & I The links below will take you to the final products for a lesson we did at the beginning of the year in 7 th and 8 th grade Critical Thinking. I felt that this was a way to let kids use their creativity and technological know-how to learn about themselves and share that knowledge with others, and also to get feedback from others about their final products. The evaluations they did are found under the Discussion tab. The students did not know (or were not supposed to know) whose video they were watching and evaluating. 7th Grade Projects 8th Grade Projects The documents that the students received to guide their process through the project are provided as links on the wiki page.

Parent Contacts I did not have any students with Ds or Fs for the interim reports! I called my first period students and documented the contacts on the 7 th grade GoogleDoc.