Hello All,
I visited the Fremont High School campus in Sunnyvale today as they were having their Flex period. I was fortunate to have the principal, Bryan Emmert, walk me around the entire time and talk about the process; I then met with a few teachers afterwards to get their insights.
I’ll just jot down a few things for now to get the conversation going …
-They use the TeachMore software for the student ID cards; and based on the website, it looks like San Mateo Union also uses them, but I am not sure if Aragon does.
-TeachMore allows teachers and areas, such as the library, to be capped at a certain number of students. So, if a teacher wants a max of 40 students, then the attempt to check in #41 is rejected; if a teacher wants to have a small session of only 20, then the teacher can set it to 20. This works well in the library, as Fremont caps the number at 100.
-TeachMore allows reservations, both teacher-initiated and student-initiated. A teacher can request a student, Johnny Apple, and if Apple attempts to check in to another classroom, a rejection message pops up. Students can reserve a spot in a teacher’s room, as well.
-The Library uses a mandatory reservation system; students must sign up in advance. I walked into the library and there was light chatter, but it was fairly quiet. The only people standing up were the certificated librarian and the classified library assistant.
-Principal Emmert said that, in the beginning, a computer lab was opened up. But Fremont quickly shut it down as it wasn’t very productive, and there was only a classified staff member in the lab. There are computers in their library and in the Admin Room (I’ll get to that room in a bit) and many teachers have carts. Maybe we should c...
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...out for a year. Teachers overwhelmingly re-approved it.
-The first couple of weeks of FLEX is called a “closed flex”, where students stay with their 4th period teachers and go over videos on how to do the reservation system, power points/webinars on how to best use FLEX. Takes pressure of the teachers, too, on teaching. Then, students undergo a small FLEX where, after lunch, they go back to the 4th period for FLEX. This gets them in the habit of moving. The final stage is the FLEX itself with the reservation system and everything. Emmert suggested he bypassed the traditional pilot of a few weeks out of worry that the students wouldn’t take it seriously, but that it could totally work in other schools.
-Videos made by ASB on using FLEX and PowerPoints are on their website still fhs.fuhsd.org
That’s all for now.
I’ll review my notes later.
Time for Star Wars.
One obvious alternative, which would thrill many teachers, would be to replace pens, pencils, paper, and the like with computer systems of one sort or another. Estimations have been made that computer systems at the school could be provided for as little as $800 per student including Internet access and basic maintenance. ('Computing Edge';, John Beecham, 1997) This approach would have many advantages, including the fact that our schools would be releasing children with at least a basic knowledge of how to operate a computer system, this in turn would make it much easier to learn to operate other, more complicated and more advanced systems, which would give our students needed job skills in today's information age.
“When schools, parents, families, and communities work together to support learning, students tend to earn higher grades, attend school more regularly, stay in school longer, and enroll in higher level programs.” (Van Roeckel, 2008, p. 1) Deer Valley High School in Glendale, AZ is the first high school built in the Deer Valley Unified Scholl District, and with a population around 1800 students, the high school is one of the bigger schools in the state. It has a tradition of family on its’ campus, where there are still teachers teaching that were there when the school opened in 1980. A number of former students have become new teachers on campus and just about all the teachers’ children have attended and graduated from the campus. With a school like ours, there are many connections to the community around it and it is demonstrated by the programs that bring in parent and community to help with the development of our students. There are numerous booster clubs run on our campus to help support student achievement on the sports fields, a school to work programs to teach the students necessary skills in different areas of either nursing, sports medicine classes, and in the culinary arts classrooms, and funding to our school to help ensure all students graduate on time. There are many programs on our campus, but I will discuss four of the programs: baseball booster club, C2G program, “school-to-work”, and the special education program sponsored by Arrowhead Hospital. These programs are designed to improve the relationships between the campus and the people in the community, and give all students on campus every opportunity to succeed in their future.
The focus of this paper is research that has been done in a number of articles about the problem patron specifically the homeless patron. One of the questions that this article is trying to answer is what the needs of the homeless patron are and how libraries can fill those needs. Even though this study is primarily focused on the homeless patron it also examines the emotional labor that librarians go through when they deal with problem patrons. Librarians like other employees who work with the public must put on a professional face when at work. This face was created to hide the more negative reactions that librarians experience when being confronted by an aggressive or annoying ...
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The Flex Belt is found at the website http://www.theflexbelt.com/index.php. I came across this product while watching an advertisement on YouTube.
Most of the people who were members of St. Patrick’s Parish were of Irish descent. Many of the families had lived in the United States for at least one generation. The newly arrived Slovak residents went to Holy Ghost Roman Catholic Church; the Poles went to St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church. Other Eastern European immigrants went to Saints Cyril and Methodius Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and All Saints Russian Orthodox Church.
*All technology, low, mid and high tech, were kept in well labeled storage bins and explained to all staff on how to use and take care of them. If a planned lesson required the use of any of these materials, they were prepared before school that day and put where a teacher could easily find them but students couldn’t run the risk of damaging them. I feel that technology is an essential piece to every classroom and used everything from iPads to projectors to highlighters and pencil grips to best support the learning success of my
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Teachers help us expand and open our mind by giving us skills throughout students’ early life to help students when they are older. By learning information from teachers, students become better people, in a couple of ways. Besides inquiring knowledge from their teachers, students learn to work with one another, open their mind to other peoples’ thoughts and ideas, respect one another, and learn different techniques for life’s issues.
When a student needs to leave the classroom and go to the office the teacher is required to stop teaching and have to
Students are in school to learn. To learn, we need willingness, interest, and excitement from both pupil and teacher. With fewer students in a class, education can become a whole lot more personal—which is good. Rebecca Meleski, a student at Cardinal Stritch University, states that she loves the small classes because it's "More engaging. Everyone can have a closer relationship with the teacher. We can get our questions answered and have the time to discuss more complicated topics". When there are fifteen or so people in a class, teachers have ample time to answer questions and give help.
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The librarian's daughter used to set books on top of that computer when she was sorting them out to be reshelved. I always thought of the computer as just that, an overglorified bookrack. I laughed to see a tall, precariously balanced pile of books on top of the monitor, which was all but hidden by its dust cover body bag. I laughed because I am a technophobe, and to see it being used in this manner reassured me that computers were, quite obviously, a waste of time and money.
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...assroom. Sometimes there are people that it would not help learn because they need that face-to-face learning. It is just the way that they learn that it could benefit them or it could not . It should be up to the students on it they want to use the old fashion pen and paper or this new technology.