Teacher Personality Quiz...

Readers,

One of my PDS students this semester sent me a link to a Teacher Personality Quiz! You know my curiosity got the best of me and I had to take it.

According to the Teacher Personality Quiz I have the Fair and Balanced personality. To read about my teaching personality and to take the quiz for your self, visit the site by clicking on any of the hypertext links in this post.

I would love to hear from you, what is YOUR Teacher Personality! Leave a comment and let me know!

del.icio.us

Updated: June 12, 2019:  Del.icio.us is no more.  See this article for more information or this one for alternatives to Del.icio.us!  Happy Bookmarking!

Educational technology has been more of an avocation for me over the past few years, than a vocation. But I have recently been asked to teach a technology class at the university. We are several weeks into the semester and I have been both enjoying my students and enjoying playing with the technology that is available to us.

This brings me to the Social Bookmarking site, del.icio.us. Here you can bookmark and tag websites, blogs, and more. You can mark them to share them with friends or keep them private. It's great for its social benefits, but even more wonderful for its research benefits. While bookmarking and tagging a website about misconceptions in earth science, I noted that six other people had bookmarked the same page. I hopped on over to their bookmarks, sorted by misconceptions and viola! I found several more useful sites on misconceptions that I might not have found on my own using Google (just due to the sheer number of hits Google generates).

Of course, I think about how this tool would have been useful to me as a third grade teacher. Had I shared my bookmarks with my team members and vice versa, we'd have had an amazing amount of resources at our fingertips. Of course, when I was teaching third grade the Internet was still in diapers and we didn't even have Internet access in our classrooms, let alone computers!

If you're curious about del.icio.us, visit their site. You can access my bookmarks here or by simply typing http://del.icio.us/katleslie into your browser. If you begin using or have used social bookmarking sites in the past, feel free to comment here about your experiences.

Yahtzee!

A card game with dice? What’s up with that? I loved this game as a kid. Orion has not quite got the hang of playing independently, so we fill out our score cards together. While this game is less than $10 at your local Wal-Mart, (Did I just make a plug for Wal-Mart?) you can easily create an entire classroom set with orphan dice(or buy them for cheap the Dollar Tree), a couple of Dixie cups, and score cards available for print here.

Science Beliefs Quiz

Gentle Readers,

As many of you know, I have spent several years researching misconceptions in earth science. I one day hope to actually put this information into dissertation form, but I digress. The other day I was reading an article about the Science Beliefs Quiz available online. I had to check it out! The Science Beliefs Quiz is a 44 question, true-false quiz over a variety of science topics from biology to earth science. If you have about 45 minutes to spend I strongly suggest visiting the Science Beliefs Quiz. Use it to evaluate your understandings and beliefs about various topics. Use it to find areas you need to improve in. Use it to find areas that interest or excite you. But please don't use it to beat yourself up.

I'd love to hear how you do on the Science Beliefs Quiz. So drop me a line via the comments and share! Yes, you can remain anonymous!

Happy testing! And remember Science Rules!

Chutes & Ladders

Oh, what fun! I don’t recall having this game as a child, but I remember playing “Go to the Head of the Class” which was quite similar. Spin the spinner and move your little person from one to one hundred. If you land on a ladder, climb up! If you land on a chute, slide down!

Britain has Snakes and Ladders which is pretty much the same. Perhaps Americans thought the snakes were too scary! Ha! Check the BBC Schools website for a Shockwave version of this game. Orion and I have stopped using the spinner with this game. We use several of the modifications that I’ve mentioned under Sorry!

Candy Land

Oh! I remember when I got my first copy of Candy Land. How I loved playing the game! Gumdrop Pass and Rainbow Trail were coveted shortcuts. Watch out, nobody wants to get stuck in the Molasses Swamp! This game is a path game. Players move their “gingerbread” pieces through the path by matching the colors on the cards that they draw. Sadly enough, Orion’s pretty much outgrown this game, but I hold on to it because I LOVE IT SO MUCH…

Recess-o-Meter*

I had to share this idea before it left my mind. I was visiting a fourth grade classroom today (Mrs. Smith, no really, that's her name!) when I discovered one of my favorite toddler toys, the Fisher Price Rock-a-Stack, sitting at the front of the room. "What's up with this?" I inquired. "This is the Recess-o-Meter*," Mrs. Smith replied and sure enough, I noticed that she had printed "Recess-o-Meter" on the bottom of the Rock-a-Stack. She went on to explain that recess was 15 minutes long and there were five donut shaped rings; each ring represents three minutes of recess. The "Recess-o-Meter" served as a reminder of how much recess the students had lost or regained due to behavior in the classroom.

This approach is very similar to writing RECESS on the chalkboard, where each letter represents a portion of recess. I must say, I found it very creative and a bit amusing to reuse an old favorite in this way!

*Author's note: I have mixed feelings about taking away recess as a punishment. I have used this method myself a time or two in the past and if I was teaching elementary school again I might resort to using it again. When I attended elementary school, we had three 20 minute recesses a day. When I taught in St. Louis, my third graders had 15 minutes of recess a day.