#teacher fun

[phenixglam-blog]

Today was the last day of third grade for my students so to celebrate I sang them a little song to the tune of “shake it off”. 

Side note: I’m tone deaf and would have butchered this so I found a parody memorized the words then yelled loudly over the original words to make it my own. The things we do to see kids smile/laugh

[anndee-123]

There are some songs that no matter where you are when they come on, you have to get up and dance, bop, rock, sway to its beat.

Even in the middle of your classroom while you’re grading essays.

[kamusensei-blog]

So White Day (the over-commercialised day in Japan where guys give back to the girls from Valentine’s Day) was on Tuesday, so on the Friday I gave all of my classes a jumbo bag of marshmallows to share.

When I brought them out they were like:

And then were like (but marshmallows not pizza):

Then then ended up like:

[avenger-nerd-mom]

Small town fun

The high school Marching Band (mostly my students) just ordered 640 nuggets. Life Goals

[avenger-nerd-mom]

@theycallmebecca is a genius! Professional SHIELD agent it is!

[crayonsandkettlebells-blog]

Anchor Chart and Interactive Notebook Foldable for RI7....CHECK! 

[ealkier]

My New Best Friend?

With the help of a colleague, I found the COOLEST classroom tool! I know we don’t have to blog about this kind of stuff constantly, but I really want to share this one. The website is www.paperrater.com, and it gives constructive feedback on any kind of writing.

I know what you’re thinking-- machines grading writing?! The soul and life will be sucked from all of the hard work! Writing is meant to be read by those with the capacity to enjoy it! I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment-- I hate this idea of giving students a grade based off of a machine's score-- but this is different than the negative experiences that I've had in the past.

Paperrater frames the whole experience in a positive light-- it’s not about failures or incompetence; it’s about looking at your existing writing and seeing what’s really there. The program only points out the areas that it thinks that the author should consider (both positive and negative) and gives suggestions-- it doesn't tell you that what you've written is "right" or "wrong." I love that this places the choice back on the author-- it even asks the author to consider their audience and purpose when revising certain sentence types! Even more helpful is the specific feedback that it gives with its suggestions:

Along with the usual spelling and grammar check, it also looks at sentence length, vocabulary, plagiarism, style, and word choice. The tool also allows you to pick the type of writing it’s grading along with the education level of the author (as low as sixth grade and as high as graduate student). When you receive feedback, it takes those aspects into consideration. I put in an old essay from my sophomore year of college in as both a high school student and as a graduate student and received very different scores. It also provides an awesome breakdown of the structure of your paper for your own analysis:

There are a few setbacks, however. Students can only receive a grade if they are in 9th grade or higher-- the system seems to grade based on high school and college level algorithms only. While the feedback is broken down simply for those who already understand how to discuss and analyze their writing, it's not as user friend for those who might struggle-- this might be a problem for some of my seventh graders. 

All in all, I am still extremely excited to use this with my students this week! It's a fantastic tool to use with the argument writing that they've been working on!

[scattered-desk]

My friend and I are so excited that we're moving out of the TA office and sharing an office in a different hall. We've been texting each other about how we pan to decorate it. Never mind the fact that we're both only guaranteed the office space and teaching job for one semester.

We've arrived bitches!