Blessed.

I will never understand why it takes such a horrible tragedy to make us realize how blessed we are. My heart aches for those who have lost loved ones in the Oklahoma tornado yesterday, but especially those families that lost their children. I guess being a teacher makes me especially tender hearted towards children. I had been avoiding the news all afternoon after the tornado because I didn't think I could take hearing about those poor innocent children. Finally, I turned on the Weather Channel and the very first thing I heard was that 7 children had been confirmed dead due to drowning in the school's basement. I lost it.

The most amazing part of it all is that even after loosing everything they owned, the people of Moore, Oklahoma were still thanking God for sparing their lives. Here I am with just a few days left of student teaching and I don't even have as positive of an attitude as these people. All I know is that I am glad student teaching is almost over and I ask that each of you reading this will say a quick prayer for the people of Oklahoma.

On a more positive note, I met the absolute nicest family yesterday. I contacted a woman about a printer that I saw for sale on Craiglist. Lately I have been searching for some items that I need for my classroom and this printer sounded perfect- it has a scanner, copier, printer, and can fax (although I don't plan on using that function) but my most favorite part is that it has wireless connectivity.... that means less wires which means less mess! After some bargaining with the lady we settled on a price of $25 for the printer since I would have to buy new ink which is very costly. I'm the type of person that if I wait too long to buy an item I will wind up changing my mind and not purchasing the item. Well of course this was the case with the printer and I contacted her again and told her I had changed my mind. I was not expecting her reply. She told me that if I would just meet up with her in town that she would just give me the printer. I was thrilled!

Fast forward a few hours and I'm finally home and ready to try out my new printer. Lo and behold, I open the box and the power cord is missing. I text her to see if she still had it and she did so at 8:30 at night I drove to her house to pick it up. She and her husband just recently moved here so they were outside in their garage cleaning up when I arrived. After much apologizing, she gave me the cord and I was about to be on my merry way when she stopped me and asked would I be interested in a lamp for my classroom. She showed me the lamp and it was so adorable. I had to have it! She handed it to me and told me to just take it. As I thanked her and turned to leave, her husband stops me and asks would I like to have a microwave too. I couldn't believe it! I had literally just been looking online at microwaves earlier that day. As I drove away, I felt so thankful for these strangers that had helped me more than they knew.

Even when we think this world is only full of evil, there are angels among us.

Teacher Appreciation

Just thought I would make a fun post to give all you teachers a good laugh for teacher appreciation week :) Hope you enjoy these ecards!

On a more serious note, THANK YOU to all teachers all over the world for doing what you do. Teachers are the foundation of all other jobs and careers! It takes a special person to love 25+ kids as their own, year after year after year. I will never forget all of the incredible teachers that taught me and I hope to leave a lasting impression on all of my own students! 

I have a job!!!

Many student teachers dream of being hired right out of college, but for many that dream does not become a reality and they spend all summer worrying about what they will be doing when August rolls around. For some reason, the Lord saw fit that I need not spend my summer worrying about a job and instead he handed it to me on a silver platter. I filled out countless job applications in hopes that someone would see me as a diamond in the rough and hire me so that I could put to good use all of the training that I have received while in school. In what was supposed to be a casual meeting with the new principal of my old high school, I was hired on the spot to become a teacher at West Marion High School. This woman had never met me before and knew nothing about me, yet she saw the hard work and passion I put into lessons and schoolwork and felt like she just had to have me as a part of her staff. I have no doubt in my mind that God wanted me to be a teacher at West Marion, no matter how much I wanted to teach elsewhere.

Many friends of mine always said how much they wanted to leave West Marion and the Columbia area, but to me there is no other place that I'd rather call home. It feels so good to go back to the school that put so much hard work and love into me and to be able to do the same thing to the kids that are there now.

Remind101

Tired of your students telling you that they "forgot" their homework, project, graded papers, field trip forms, etc.?? Well worry no more! Remind101 is a FREE messaging system designed for teachers to send out mass text messages to the parents of every student in your class. Do your students seem to forget every week to bring back their signed graded papers? Just send out a text to a selected group and each and every person that has subscribed to receive these text messages will get any that alert to remind them that their child has papers that need to be signed! Amazing, right??

To sign up, go to www.remind101.com. As I said before, it is completely FREE to use. To begin, you will create a class (more can be added later). After creating a class, you will be instructed to text a certain number with a specific message. Once this is done, it will ask for your full name. When these steps are completed, you are ready to let the parents have their turn at signing up! They will also text that same number with the same message and will then also have to send their full name. Once the parents have completed the sign up process to receive the alerts, you will see their names show up in the subscriber section of your account.

Now you are ready to send the alerts! Type the message in the text box provided and click send! That's it! All your messages will show in your message history, providing documentation of the messages that you have sent so that no one can argue that you sent something that you really did not send. As we all know, documentation is about the most important job a teacher has (besides teaching of course).

My hope in posting about this service is to help teachers in making sure that parents are aware of classroom assignments as well as any other important notices. I think that Remind101 is an invaluable tool and I know without a doubt that I will be using it!

Class Dojo: Behavior Management System

While student teaching I have encountered many classroom management programs. I have seen clipboards with about a million behavior codes, ticket reward systems, pink slips, etc., but my favorite by far has been an online behavior management system called Class Dojo (www.classdojo.com). This website allows teachers to create multiple classes in order to keep up with the behavior of allll of your students. It is FREE to use and allows students and parents to keep up with individual students' behavior.

When you get signed up, you will get a tutorial of how to use the program. It is very helpful to go through the entire tutorial so that you can better understand each feature of the program. Once you have completed the tutorial, you may create your own class. All you have to do is name your class, put in a list of all of your students (you can even copy and paste a student list), and then you are ready to go! To give a student a positive or negative mark, you click on the student's name and the positive or negative tab. Each tab lists some behaviors pertaining to being on/off task, teamwork, materials, etc. The BEST part is that you can customize the behaviors to fit the needs of your classroom! INCREDIBLEEEE!

Whether you view the next part as a pro or a con is your own decision. Class Dojo offers signups for parents and students. You can either invite the parents by entering their email in the program OR you can print out a list of parent codes and send them home with the students and the parents can go to the site and put the code in to automatically view their child's behavior for the day, week, month, etc. Some teachers may view this is a problem because parents will constantly be asking why their child received the marks they received. It's really up to you if you want to use this feature.

The idea of using Class Dojo is to keep it pulled up on your Promethean board, or just on your computer screen, with speakers also attached to your computer. Having the speakers is essential if you want the students to know when someone receives a mark, whether it be positive or negative. The reason for this is that when you assign a student (or students) a positive or negative mark, a sound is played to indicate the type of mark. When students hear this they can be assured that at least someone, if not multiple students, is doing good and that motivates them to do good as well. The same can be said if a negative mark is given to someone. The students hear that someone got a negative mark and this may influence the students to change their behavior if they know they are doing something wrong. If at all possible, I would keep the program pulled up on the Promethean board, though, so that students can see their names and know when and what kind of mark they receive and can also know the reason they received that mark.

All I know is I absolutely plan to use this system one way or another when I begin teaching next year. I think it is absolutely awesome! I hope you all check it out! If you love the online version, check out the app for teachers by clicking on one of these links: ClassDojo for iPhone or ClassDojo for Android.