Middle Level Education Institute 2008

For the consultants and their great sessions to all of the teachers who came and the great advice and encouragement you gave us, one big "thank you"!  Hope to see you this fall.

The home team won today in a valiant struggle for the World Title. After numerous dives in the grass and on the blacktop, the momentary loss of the game ball, and bats being thrown, the game came to an exciting finish. With a final score of 15 to 7 both teams left the field with confidence that a career in teaching will be much more rewarding than any wiffle ball world title.

Here is another YouTube video that is simmilar to the last one but goes along very well with the tech learning this week...
Click Here.

•    Wally Alexander with MAMLE has books available in the Woolley Room!  Go check them out and see if there are any that you could use in your classroom!
•    Check it out!  There are 6 sessions today! 
•    Barbara Greenstone and Phil Brookhouse will be available in the Woolley room today for made to order Professor Development!  They will be available to answer questions on Noteshare, StudyWiz, etc, and help you figure out how it could be useful to you in your own classroom!
•    There are two evaluations embedded in the MLEI Notebook in Page 1, just click the evaluation and leave some feedback so Ed Brazee and Gert Nesin can know how they did!
•    Make sure to check out the schedule for tomorrow in the Notebook!  It is completely different from the routine!

We had a great time in Nancy’s Tuesday session, “Creating Compelling Curriculum.”  She talked about the phenomenon of teaching too much, too fast, and too fragmented and gave us some great ideas for incorporating student input into our curriculum.  Nancy also gave us the chance to think about some big questions we could build a unit around.  Although the session was geared towards middle school curriculum, those of us hoping to teach other grades got some great ideas, too.  Thanks for a great session, Nancy!!

This is an interesting perspective on education and technology.
Click Here

Hi everyone.  Doug asked us to get this on to the blog for everyone to use.  Now you can get to the NoteShare notebook with your browser.

http://169.244.30.87/NoteShare/Notebooks/MiddleLevelInstitute/MLEI2008Resources/?1

-Cheers,

Christopher

In Jill Spencer’s class “Connecting Curriculum Across the Disciplines” the class was treated to a lesson on allowing students to use synectics (and cookies) to bring ideas together in order to integrate lessons.  The skills taught could easily be used in a classroom (where it was originally suggested to be used), but I also feel that it has a valid use amongst administrators when trying to make decisions that will have overarching effects.

Jill’s words of wisdom for us would be and current educators is to over plan your lesson but don’t rush through it.  Thanks Jill!

-Cheers,

Christopher

Just a few comments on this session with Nancy Doda...

This session was great!  We learned several different strategies and activities to help build relationships and a sense of community with our students.  In particular I really liked the Kagan dice activity.  I found a website where you can buy these dice, kits and books…
http://www.kaganonline.com/Catalog/HigherLevelThinking1.html

The Heart Map, Rain Dance, Check In, and 4 Corners were also among the activities we learned about that help build the student to teacher and student to student relationship.

An important concept that I took away from this session was how crucial it is to involve the students in this whole process. 

-Ben Tripp

We appreciate the comments on the team blog so far!  Please feel free to use this space to share what you're working on this week and to share ideas with other teams!!