Skip to main content

See a need, fill a need...

Recently, my family was gifted the movie, "Robots" and we watched it a handful of times, and the line, "See a need, fill a need" is one that resonated with me.  I believe that as educators we see lots of needs on a daily basis, but the filling of needs may be an area where we need some improvement.

I got the opportunity to really live out the "See a need, fill a need" idea in our final meeting with our Burke County Global Educators Cohort (BCGEC). We kicked off our session with a Gripe Jam activity.  Jennie Magiera had shared this activity at NCTIES during her PD is not a 4 Letter Word session.  The Gripe Jam activity is a great way to think about challenges that we face as individuals, and then collectively brainstorm ways to address the challenges.

One of the collaborative conversations that took place as a result of our Gripe Jam was a need for a collection of technology resources that could be categorized and searched in order find an appropriate tool for a task. Using a collection of resources created by, Donna Wells, a fellow ITF, I created an Awesome Table view and hosted it on a Google Site, along with a Google Form for teachers to complete in order to suggest a resource that should be included. You can check out the site here: https://sites.google.com/burke.k12.nc.us/techtools/home

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BreakoutEDU, YES!

Plan. Schedule. Print. Prep. Hide clues. Set locks. Test locks. Double-check clues.  Breathe. Engage. Breakout! I won't sugarcoat this, the process of preparing for my first BreakoutEDU session took me a long time!  (I used a pre-made game, Grammar Guru, it was great by-the-way!) However, every bit of time I spent printing, cutting, re-printing, scanning, and building was WORTH IT! Cyndi Childers, a 6th grade teacher at East Burke Middle School, was looking for something to get her students engaged, and I knew Breakout was just the trick. We ran two simultaneous games in two rooms, with Cyndi facilitating one room and myself in the other.  We had groups about about 12-15 students in each room.  The group size worked, it could have been smaller, but it really wasn't bad at all.   This game has a progression of clue finding, one leading to another, so they were all somewhat forced to be working together on 1-2 clues at once, which I liked.  This help...
5 comments
Read more
This week was the first of the BCPS summer schedule, Monday through Thursday, with 11 and 12 month employees working 10 hour days.  On paper that sounds awesome, a three day weekend, and getting your 40 hour work-week in.  Well, I completed this four day work week.   And... I. AM. TIRED.   It didn't help that I forgot to turn my 4:50am alarm off, and was wide awake this morning well before sunrise.  However, its after 10am now, and I've had my coffee and shower, and I'm feeling alive.  This week has been productive, successful, and exhausting!  The team of Instructional Tech Facilitators had been assigned the task of setting up all the school/grade level sets of iPads with Apple Configurator in an effort to get them managed by Filewave.   We met Monday morning at Salem Elementary to get started with a cart of 30 iPads.  This was a teaching/learning session in which a team of all the ITFs serving the elementary schools wor...
2 comments
Read more

September, eesh!

Back to school season is full of events, changes, new people, meetings, and for the Wolfhope family, a periodic fever syndrome for our younger son.  The stress of handling 'all the things' is often tolerable for me, until it's not. I love my job, and the responsibility and the freedom to try and fail, but ultimately succeed. I like knowing how to do things, things that are really kind of over my head, but I think I may be addicted to learning new things. That quest for always knowing more, the love of figuring things out, and the genuine joy I get for solving problems and helping people has really carried me through one of the most eventful Septembers I can remember. But... I'm no superwoman. I have failed, and failed, and failed over and over again. I have let stress and a workload carry-over at home, often distracted, or saying, "I'm almost done." I was overcome with tears, just days prior to my son's surgery date. He's fine. He's a champio...
1 comment
Read more