Good Morning Everyone!
- Department Meeting: scheduled for tomorrow - Sept 18th in FX 135
- Professional Development day: Scheduled for Sept 21st (details TBA, however we will mostly be given department time. Teachers interested in WebEx will have an opportunity to go to a session at 1:15)
- IEP and 504 - Please make sure you are reviewing these plans and collaborating with co-teachers (if applicable).
- All English I teachers... ESL referrals - Please begin keeping a list of any students that you think need to be evaluated for possible placement in ESL. Over the next few weeks, please give some kind of in-class writing sample so that you can evaluate their raw writing ability. Also, it would be helpful to give them some kind of assignment that requires them to speak aloud in class so you can evaluate them in this regard as well. I will ask for your recommendations by mid-October.
- Emergency Contact Forms
- Grade-level Teams
- Schedules for All grade-level teams are being created – I should have them done by our meeting tomorrow.
- SGO Pre-Assessments should be completed by 9-28. Please assist colleagues with the sharing of grade-level folders, assessments, etc…
- Sunshine Committee Contributions
- See Bob /Melissa D. / Melissa S.
- Attendance reminders: Attendance must be input within the first 10 minutes of class every day, for all classes. New Procedure – teachers must enter “A” for absent or “P” for present. We will no longer leave it blank for “present.”
- Power Teacher & Gradebook set-up: Get this done ASAP. Be sure weights are aligned with school policy. Kim Prinzo is on PowerTeacher duty during period 7 – contact her for help!
- Resources: Check these out!
- Please email them back to me if you have not yet done so...
- Bloom’s Literature (via Facts on File)—it’s a nice resource for ELA teachers! Both Bosa and Claire are available for answering questions or helping!
- Commonlit https://www.commonlit.org/ This is a free site that is incredibly user-friendly. I know Kim and I have used it in the past so feel free to ask us for help! It is especially helpful for homework, sub-work if you are out, etc... It grades the work for you and it great for ELA text analysis practice. If you are looking for something that you can assign but don't have to invest a lot of time in, this is it. There are fantastic text sets, assignments, book pairings, etc. and you can filter by genre, student level, literary devices, and theme. I would advise however that we communicate with our grade-level teams to make sure we don't repeat assignments.
- Newsela https://newsela.com/ This one is new to me, so if anyone wants to check it out and let us know if it is useful, have at it! It is an interesting bank of articles and non-fiction that may be useful for RST prompts.
- Socrative Frank can fill us in on this site however if we get enough teachers that would like to use it, we can request that we are given a district subscription for the "Pro" version. Socrative is a cloud-based student response system developed in 2010. It allows teachers to create simple quizzes that students can take quickly on laptops – or, more often, via classroom tablet computers or their own smartphones. Quizzes can be true/false, multiple choice, graded short answer or allow open-ended short responses. Activities can either be teacher-paced (for use during a classroom discussion) or student-paced (for use as a more traditional class-end “exit ticket” or quiz). There’s also a gaming element: the “Space Race” feature can set up a quiz so that teams of students can compete against one another to launch rockets into space. Results can be displayed live in the classroom to facilitate discussion (with student identity kept anonymous). Socrative quizzes can also be shared with other teachers; as of mid 2013, Socrative had built up a library of 315,000+ quizzes that any teacher could use.
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