Logical Poetry

 I am very fortunate that my school district invests in training teachers. For the past two school years, we have had optional  professional workshops in the winter and summer. There are multiple days with choices available for different grade levels. Last year, they were all separated by grade band. This year, there's more overlap between the grade levels on different days. So yesterday was 3-6, today was 4-6, and tomorrow is 6-8. I didn't realize that I could have also gone yesterday, but it worked out anyway because yesterday was my own kids' first day of the second semester.  I am so glad they made the switch, because previously there was minimal involvement from people at my middle school, and we are the only middle school in the district. So today I got to work with not just teachers from my school, but from all of the elementary schools. It always helps to have additional perspectives from both sides. It also helps that everyone who was there signed up to be there....

 Part of setting up my class with the Modern Classroom Project is a progress tracker. This worked well for my CS classes, since I follow the Code.org curriculum and they already have unit and lesson numbers. The biggest problem that I have is that both of my CS classes are around 40 students, and trying to display that many names in a way that everyone can see is challenging. Even with my large interactive tv screen, it can be hard to see everyone. Another issue I had is that I would allow students to keep working on lessons while we were in the same unit, but often I'd have students who'd finish the work a week later than everyone else and be upset that their progress wasn't updated on the tracker. Code is a bit different with mastery checks because students do a project to prove mastery, and I'm not able to limit their access to that. As I'm writing that, I'm wondering if I can set up a multiple choice form for each lesson based on the project they are suppose...