Category Archives: admin

admin, learning reflections, thinking on paper

Reflecting on Reflecting

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One of the hardest things to do for students is to reflect – truly reflect – on their learning or on a topic. One of the hardest things to do for teachers is to teach students how to reflect.

The problem is that reflecting can be done in many different ways. People can reflect on topics, on strategies, on things they found interesting or things they found confusing. People can consider reasons something went well or badly and can explore changes to make for the future.

I tell my students that reflecting is looking back to move forward. It is a form of metacognitive thinking, which is a fancy way of saying “thinking about thinking.” When you reflect, you consider your learning (how you learned, why your strategies were effective or not) and what that means for future learning, or learning in a different subject. For example, perhaps you notice that you understand things better in class after having had a chance to discuss it with your group. How could you use that knowledge to improve your understanding in all of your subjects? What would you need to do?

Or maybe you find that when you have “group discussions,” you quickly get off track and think of random observations from your life or YouTube. What are some ways that you could keep yourself focused? Why do you think those strategies might work? How will you implement them?

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admin, learning reflections, musing, thinking on paper

Self-assessment

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I’m going to be going to a workshop with other teachers on self-assessment, reflection and the Core Competencies tomorrow, and I was wondering if you would give me some feedback about our use of these things in our classroom (think the learning map and your portfolios; self-assessing your work; our Friday reflections; the Core Competency self-assessment you did with your block D teacher; etc.).

Thanks in advance for your help!

admin, blogging, WWS

Posting Guidelines

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I’m noticing that several of my students are making the same mistakes when it comes to posting their Writers’ Workshop assignments (WWS) to their blogs, so here’s a checklist. Please ensure that the following guidelines are followed when you are posting to your blog:

  1. Put the title of your writing (and all writing should have a title that is related to the topic, not “WWS 1” or “Name’s Blog”) in the title line for adding your new post.
  2. Don’t include the date or your name. Both of those will show up with your post (well, it will be your username, but still) and don’t need to be part of the body.
  3. Make sure your writing is left-justified (aligns with the left side of the text box), not centre- or right-justified.
  4. Check your paragraphing: make sure that you don’t switch paragraphs in the middle of a sentence (or that you do switch paragraphs when you’re supposed to).
  5. If you’re typing your post in the text box rather than copying and pasting something you’ve already typed (and run through spell-check), check the spelling. Edublogs uses the little red lines to show you when you’ve misspelled something – check those words.
  6. Finally, make sure that your post is actually typed (or copied and pasted) into the text box. Don’t upload it as a file, whether a picture or a .pages or .docx file. (You’re welcome to upload a picture that actually goes with your writing, though, as long as either you have taken it or you have credited the person who did take it.)

If you follow these stylistic requirements, you will avoid me sending your post back to you as a draft multiple times. This first one is not counting as a late assignment because you’re still learning how to use Edublogs (and, many of you, blogging in general); future assigned posts that have these mistakes, however, will be considered late. Remember to use the “Preview” button to let you see what your post will look like on your blog before you submit it for review.

If you’re not sure how to do something, check with me before or after school and I can help you with it – or post it early so that if there are problems you’ll have time to fix them.

Happy blogging!