I teach language: high school English and lower level Spanish. Communication is my business. And grades are communication. It is my goal to help students understand and be understood, but for that to happen, they have to understand me, right? They have to understand my expectations. It’s the very driving Read more…
Among the most visited posts from 2016, some are policies that I’ve been implementing but just hadn’t put in writing before. Some posts are the direct result of inspiration at #TELLCollab16 his spring. Another was trying to jump on a trend (that turned out not to be as trendy as Read more…
I think Standards-Based Grading is the way to go. As a parent, I want to know how well my kiddo is keeping up with expectations in, well, everything he’s expected to do. If I can get some kind of indication of what IS expected and how close he is to Read more…
I have a handful of secret weapons that make my web experience–and my students’–smoother and more productive, and several of them are free in the Chrome Web App store. Extensity First of all, if you’re going to have more than one or two extensions, and you need to function at Read more…
I’ve officially been using IPAs for a year now, and I could not be happier with the results. I finally got around to graphing last semester’s final IPA results, and it is pretty much all good news. You can see significant differences between last year and this, not least among Read more…
It’s 11:00 PM the night before grades are due, and you only have 55 e-portfolio pledges for review left on ForAllRubrics…not to mention a few late essays from SAT Prep. Life doesn’t have to be this way, amiga! Set yourself up for success. OK, you know now that you can Read more…
My first EDPuzzle IPA mashup went pretty smoothly this week. I think it really helped students break down the listening into manageable chunks to make the overall task approachable. I’m also really glad that I chose to add in my little summary audio commentary at various intervals because students were still Read more…
I know my goal for the year is to focus more on Less, but my portfolio process demands a little bit of both. And so, after hours days weeks of retooling, I am once again overhauling what portfolios look like in my Spanish classes: MORE – proficiency expectations: we’re gonna Read more…
I think tests are stupid. A test can’t tell you how well I do my job or live my life–or anything you really need to know about me. Now, I’m really good at taking tests, and if you were to look at various test scores I’ve accumulated in my life, Read more…
Blogging in the L2 is something that I’ve researched a good bit. Vygotsky would say it’s awesome for capitalizing on the social nature of learning, and if I may speak for Sr. Krashen, it’s also pretty nifty in how it helps lower ye olde affective filter. And everyone seems to Read more…