Sunday Scoop and an update on my crazy life...

It has been months since I've been on my poor bloggy! Now that it is summer, I am hoping to be back up here more often. So much has happened since I last posted (which was in March, whoops!)

It's been a crazy past few months! I left my position as an 8th grade math teacher to transition to my new role as my school's Instructional Technology Facilitator. It was really hard to leave my kiddos, especially before the school year was over and the EOGs were near by, but I was confident in leaving my kiddos with my intern from ECU that has been with me all year long. It was tough but it all worked out and my kids showed a ton of growth on their end of grade tests!

My new role as a tech facilitator allows me to work with other teachers at my school and help them with anything they need help with: finding resources, help incorporate technology in their lessons, be in charge of the ipads at school, etc. I love my new job and it's a nice change of pace compared to being in the classroom. I am excited to see how next year will be with me starting in my position at the beginning of the school year as opposed to the end. Another adjustment is that I am now a 12 month employee so I now have to work over the summer. No summer vacay for me!

I've also started back up with grad school. I was already 3 classes in from when I was in grad school a couple of years ago. So I should be graduating next summer with a MaED in Instructional Technology if all goes as planned. Speaking of, I should be doing my last assignment for this last class that's due tomorrow....oops! :-p

Now for Teaching Trio's Sunday Scoop!

Happy Sunday and Happy Father's Day! :-)

Sunday Scoop

I'm linking up with Teaching Trio for this week's Sunday Scoop!

3 Things

• Laundry is always on my Sunday list! There are only two of us - I don't know how we use so many clothes so fast!
• Grocery store shopping...I dread going every week! Even so on Sunday's. Everyone is always shopping for groceries on Sunday's...I'm kicking myself for not going yesterday!
• Lesson Plans - the weather in NC has been absolutely crazy! Seriously, this past Wednesday, the high was 78 degree and that night, we had freezing rain and we ended up having a 2 hr delay the next morning! This crazy weather has been messing with the flow of my lessons so I"m having to re-adjust a little bit.

2 Things

• Spring break is near! Only 2 weeks until Spring break, so I'd like to get the rest of my month planned out if this weather will cooperate!
• Again, because of the weather, we ended up missing about 2 weeks of school last month. Of course, I was anticipating being out all this time and didn't bring anything home! Silly me! Now I'm so behind and progress reports go out Tuesday.

1 Thing

• This makes me sound like a complete nerd, but I love re-organizing my dropbox! I am constantly creating content, updating content, or finding resources, and when I'm in a hurry I just drop it in my box. I like everything to be organized, so I usually re-organize once a month.

Hope everyone has a fantastic week!

Five for Friday

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday!

I love getting ready for working and see Kramer sleeping on the couch. He's so cute! (and spoiled!)

I love my co-workers/friends! We had the opportunity to represent our school at the annual NCTies conference in Raleigh for the past two days! It's a conference that is focused on Technology in the schools. We had an absolute blast! I learned so much from the classes I attended and I'm hoping to make a blog post soon on some of the resources I learned about to share with everyone!

This was one of the best classes I attended at the conference! I learned about so many resources from this presenter/principal named Todd. You should check out his website! It's http://www.the3techninjas.org/. He was so entertaining and had a lot of great ideas!

Yesterday before we headed back home, we decided to eat lunch at this restaurant called "Cow Fish". It's really good! They specialize in burgers, sushi, and burgushi. Yes, burger in sushi. It sounds weird but it was actually pretty good! I'll have to go back another time. Such a nice atmosphere and some of the best sushi I've had!

I've been implementing TenMarks in my class for EOG prep and I needed something to motivate my kids! So I created these classroom coupons to use as incentives. I plan on giving these out to students that score 80% or higher on the CC objective that's assigned to them. When they scan these, it gives them a picture of what they've won. It ranges from HW passes to getting to sit in my rolly chair.

And as a bonus...this made me so excited today!

Richard Byrne from www.freetech4teachers.com started following me on Instagram and left a comment on one of my pictures! I was sitting in one of his classes at the conference and snapped a pic to post on instagram because it was so packed, we had to sit on the floor between the tables!

Thanks for visiting! :)

March Currently!

Two posts in one day! Whoop whoop!!

I'm linking up with Farley for March Currently (I can't believe it's March already!)

Listening
We've been working in our office today (me with lesson planning and he was working on setting up his new website - he makes custom knives!) so we're off to a late start with dinner. He's cooking up some veggie patties with broccoli and brown rice! Yum!

Loving
TenMarks! If you haven't heard of tenmarks, it's a free program online that I am using to prep for end of grade testing. I blogged about how I use it in my classroom here! Check it out!

Thinking
I am SO behind in my curriculum! We have had two weeks of snow!! I don't know how I'm going to get caught up! I usually like to move at a pace that allows me the whole month of May to review, but with all of this snow, it's not going to happen. I'm hoping with implementing tenmarks, I will be able to start my review now throughout the year instead of trying to squeeze it into May.

Wanting
I have a bad habit of starting products for TpT and then never finishing them! I probably have about 10 products just sitting on my desktop. I am hoping that spring break will be the chance I need to get these finished and posted!

Needing
With the snow days, I need to re-adjust everything I have planned. I need to find time to sit down and plan everything, maybe even to the end of the year!

Spring Break Plans
Three words - TpT, Blogging, Netflix. Nuff said!

Thanks for reading and visiting! Hope everyone has a fantastic week! :)

Sunday Scoop

Good Morning! I'm linking up with Teaching Trio for this week's Sunday Scoop!

Hope everyone enjoys their Sunday!! Have a great week! <3

TenMarks for EOG Prep

Have any of you used the online program called TenMarks? I absolutely love it! I am using this program to prepare my kids for the end of grade tests at the end of the year.

TenMarks is a free math program that has a library of common core standards by grade. You can go in and assign standards to your classes or by student to complete practice problems. When students work on their assignments, it provides hints and videos that they can use to help them through a problem. I really like the questions that the program provides for each standard because it's not all multiple choice - some are fill in the blank and some also have checkboxes for questions that have more than one answer.

This is what the teacher dashboard looks like.

This is what is looks like when you click on a specific assignment you've assigned your class.

Based off of this, I know I need to go back over irrational numbers!

This is what it looks like when you click on the assignment. It gives you the status of each student in your class. When you click on their score, it will show you the questions they had and which questions they got correct, partially correct, and incorrect. It shows you what they put as their answer and what the correct answer should have been. It also tells you if they've used the hints and videos, as well as how much time they've spent on an assignment. I had one student make a 10% and he spent literally 1 minute on the assignment. I made him go back and do it again!

This is what it looks like when you go to the curriculum tab to assign your class an assignment.

As you can see, you can choose which standard you want to assign to them. You can also pull up to 3 standards from other grades (using the free version).

By far, my most favorite part of the program - THE DATA! Look at this! This first picture is the performance by class at a glance.

And this picture is the performance by CC standard! When you click on the colored dots, it tells you which individual student falls in that category!

When students complete an assignment, data gets sent back to the teacher. When you look at each individual student, you can see their "report card", which lists every score they've made for every assignment assigned. When you're looking at the class, it gives you the class average, average amount of time spent, and the most common mistakes your class made. I especially love that because the program will automatically detect deficiencies am able to go back and re-teach what they mostly missed.

What I am doing in my class is assigning two standards a week - 10 questions each. 1 standard is focused on a topic we covered in a previous nine weeks as a review. The other standard is on a topic we are covering at the moment. They are assigned these assignments on Monday and they have until that Friday to complete them. For students that score lower than a 60%, I will have them go back and re-do the problems they missed. They will be required to provide a correct solution (which the program gives them already) and an explanation as to how to get to the correct solution.

I am also planning on having a reinforcement plan for students that score above 80%. My principal is really pushing proficiency above 80%. It's still a thought in process, but I am thinking of maybe putting the names of students that have score 80% or higher on a TenMark assignment into a box by blocks and drawing two names a week to win a HW pass. But then I am also thinking I want to do something for all kids that score higher than 80%. Any thoughts or suggestions?

Because we always seem to run out of time towards the end of the year (and the fact that we've been out for 7 days because of snow), I think this will be a great way to have my kids constantly reviewing these common core standards to prepare for the EOG. I am hoping to make a future blog post on their progress (This is my 2nd week implementing, but we've been out for a week due to snow). I am positive that this will be beneficial!!

The program is free! To sign up and check it out, click here!

Sunday Scoop

I'm linking up with Teaching Trio for this week's Sunday Scoop!

3 Things I have to do
Last Monday, we left school early because of hazardous weather that was coming our way (I live in Eastern NC, we normally don't get much winter weather down here!) I was not expecting to miss the rest of the week! You would think that since I was home all week long that I would have the laundry done and lessons done for the week but I was just sooooo lazy! And it felt great to just once take a breather, relax, and do what I wanted to do! Now it's kicking me in the behind because I'm having to do these all at the last minute, but it was completely worth it! :)
As for wrapping my head around this upcoming week, they're calling for snow midday tomorrow and snow on Thursday, so it will be a wonky week. This should be fun!

2 Things I hope to do
I have about 10 products that I've started and just never gotten around to finish! I really need to get this up and running since it's been awhile since I posted something new on my page. I also want to work on another freebie for my followers since March is just around the corner!
I did take some time during this weekend to start prepping for my next unit, which is on system of equations. I need to find some time to sit down and finish everything at once so I will be planned ahead of time!

1 Thing I'm happy to do
Sims 4. Oh my word...not sure how many of you play but I've been playing Sims since I was in middle school and Sims 1 first came out. I own every single Sims game and expansion pack. Last Tuesday, Sims 4 finally came out on Mac and I've been playing every day like a mad woman. This is the reason why I haven't gotten anything school related done!

Until next time! <3