TIP Presentations and Wordle

I thought that the TIP presentations were really useful! I already ran copies of the D-W-B chart, shared it with my principal and fellow teachers. I am looking forward to trying it out next week in my classroom. There were many other great ideas as well. I have been contemplating about how I could use the stop light idea in my classroom - whether cups or cards would work best with my sixth grade students. While looking through the TIP presentation papers from last week, since I missed class, I thought that the 'Baggage Claim' idea would be fun to use at the beginning of the year next year.

Overall, I thought that the TIP presentations were while worth the time and effort that it took to put them together and I was really happy about getting so many new ideas to use in my classroom. These are things I will actually use, and really soon. It is always refreshing to learn new strategies that can be quickly implemented and create new activities for students to complete which keeps them on their toes. I would love to have all the teachers at my school do something like this for a professional development meeting; I think it would be useful and would create a stronger sense of community in our building.

Also, I did a Wordle (which I love!!) for my blog and found that the biggest word was 'students'. This was good to see and reminded me that I need to continue to be focused on my students. This part of the year is always difficult, with testing quickly approaching there is a lot of pressure and the students are in need of a break. The other dominate words in my Wordle were 'reading', 'classroom', 'think' and 'teaching'. I also found the word 'love' near the word 'TWS', which I found humorous! Other words that stood out to me that I haven't thought about in regards to teaching lately were 'reflecting' and 'preassessment'. These are two things that I haven't done recently in my classroom and although I don't know if I would say I loved the TWS it did bring back many things that I could be improving on as a teacher and areas that have grown weaker throughout the last four years while I have been in the classroom.

*I talked to my principal the other day and he is hoping to get a SMARTboard for my classroom next year!! :)