Everything I Needed To Know In Life...I learned from Ms. Frizzle

I loved the Magic School Bus when I was a kid...in fact I ever played Arnold's cousin Janet in our fourth grade class play The Magic School Bus Gets Lost in the Solar System. I really wanted to be Ms. Frizzle but she was lost for about half the play and clearly I desired more stage time than that. Janet seemed like the best of both worlds, she took over in Ms. Frizzle's absence and since she was super bossy it was also a great fit for me.

For those of you that don't remember Janet (I wish I had a picture of me as Janet I'm sure my 90s clothes and hair would be a great laugh in 2014). 


Anyways I wish I took Ms. Frizzle's advice more to heart. The older I've gotten the less likely I have been to take changes. The Gafe Summit this weekend was a great reminder that Ms. Frizzle WAS right. If we don't take chances, make mistakes, and get messy nothing will ever get done.

Failure was a reoccurring topic at the summit this weekend. Today I came across this blog post on Twitter---The Dung Ball-Progress Through Failure. (Thanks @JamesTSanders)
It was the reminder I needed to keep pushing forward and working hard in my classroom--sometimes regardless of the outside voices. In the past I have shied away from blogging about my technology use and stuck to my super cute (in my opinion...) TPT items.

So today I took a chance with my kids. Last night I blogged about recording my first two screencasts to use with my kids. I created one about what grouping with multiplication and one about how to access their Google Doc and work in it.

We reviewed grouping and went over where the resources were. I set the timer for 10 minutes and told my friends I was going to be invisible until the timer went off. Not surprisingly the kids quickly adapted, got in, and got to work. I almost cried when I saw that one of my lowest students was the first one done--and done correctly and quickly. She had reviewed the video clips at her own speed and had no trouble completing the assignment. In fact she had the opportunity to be a resource for the other students.

With so many of my kids receiving services and/or extra help my room can be quite the revolving door. Having the screencast allowed me to send my friends to their laptops to review the lesson if they had missed it. Now I'm excited to take it one step further. It has been hard to find the time to work with some of my struggling students between balancing all of their schedules and giving mini lessons to my class as a whole. With prerecording/collecting lessons for my kids I can let some of them review the lesson on their own while I work in guided groups with the kids that need the extra support.

So tomorrows challenge...let the kids view the videos for tomorrow's lesson on their own. While they are doing that I can pull my kids who need fact practice for our touch math group before the revolving door starts and kids start vanishing.

Even though I felt like an idiot I added voice-overs to my screen cast this time. Hopefully this will help guide my kiddos enough. Wednesday's challenge is to get them to screenshot and explain their own work so this is an important stepping stone!

If you are extremely bored (or want to know how to layer pictures in google docs) check out my video below...

Now on to prep some sub-plans so I can watch the PearDeck webinar at 11am!

PS Don't forget there's several items in my TPT store I have marked down until Halloween!