East Side Middle School PATINS Team

5/3:  Meeting with Daniel

Today we had a meeting after school to discuss the grant and what we have left to do to fulfill our part for this year.  We have most of our requirements done alreay, so it’s just a matter of finishing a few things up and we’re done.  It’s been great having the technology and learning about so many resources for the classroom.

Our team met today for our weekly meeting.  We spent most of our time preparing our presentation for the faculty meeting on April 6.  Next week is our Spring Break, so we need to have it ready to go for that Monday when we return.  W

2/26:  PATINS conference

We had an opportunity to attend the PATINS conference this year.  This was such a helpful conference.  It was great to see all the different teams and what technology they use and how they use it in their classroom.

One of the best things about the conference was learning about all the free sources of technology and how you can use it in the classroom.  It was great to see how you can put things on the ipods and how you can read books, or quizzes and tests, and get them put on the ipods.  I hope to be able to use all that in my classroom in the future.

The conference was a great experience.  It was a shame to find out that the PATINS grant will no longer be offered, but I’m thankful for the technology that we’ve had this year.

Our team met today and had a good discussion about our presentation at the April faculty meeting.  We are all really excited about Angel’s idea to include staff members in the demonstration.  We worked up an outline of what we want to include in the presentation.  We are going to begin with an explanation of UDL, hopefully to sway some misconceptions that its purpose is only to serve special education students.  Next, we are going to utilize the Smart Board to present an electronic version of our Tic-Tac-Toe presentation.  We will call up a staff member or two to demonstrate the use of the Smart Board and the Interwrite pad.  We will end with an explanation of our desire to revise our mp3 player policy and some examples of how they can be beneficial to instruction and learning.  We know that there will probably be some resistance to this request, so we hope to include the opinions of the staff in order to shape a policy that can benefit everyone.  Each of us at the meeting today took responsibility for planning a portion of the presentation, and we are confident and excited about showing our progress with UDL.

We also discussed our possible attendance at the Tech Expo in April.  We hope to be able to go, but as our district is in severe financial difficulty, requesting conference leaves has become very difficult.  We should know within a few days if it will be possible for us to attend.

Word of the PATINS grant has spread to some of our colleagues in the building.  For some reason, many are under the assumption that the purpose of this grant is to serve only special education students.  Many people are also cynical about new initiatives and see them as “just one more thing” that will come and go like everything else.  We can’t say we blame them…so many initiatives and programs are thrown at educators year after year, and often they either don’t work or there is not a good enough plan in place for sustainability.  We believe UDL is different.  For this reason, our team has requested time at our April faculty meeting to explain what UDL is (and what it is not).  We plan to demonstrate the Smart Board and the Interwrite pad (I LOVE the Interwrite pad).  We also hope to be able to show the Read Out Loud software, but so far we have not had any luck with acquiring this from our district.

We are also going to request that the staff support a change in our mp3 player policy.  As it stands now, the policy is that they are banned from 7:20 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.  We hope to create a new policy that allows mp3 player use at appropriate times and that teaches students what is appropriate and what is not.   We hope to include some examples of how podcasting can be beneficial to instruction.  I have installed Audacity on my computer, but it seems pretty confusing.  I’ve been able to record my own voice, but there is a lot I still don’t understand.  I wish I could attend the PATINS workshop on podcasting, but my schedule won’t allow it.  I hope there will be another opportunity to do that…but until then, I’ll do my best to educate myself.  I know that until I am able to make podcasting simple for myself, I won’t be able to convince any of my colleagues to try it.

We had our weekly meeting on Friday.  We talked about this blog, actually.  We looked at how to leave comments, how everyone can register their own blog accounts, and then can be added as administrators to this blog.  Using edublogs is a great way to do the reflective journaling required for PATINS, and we look forward to extending its use into the classroom as we learn more.

Collaboration Day was our best UDL experience so far! The day began with tic-tac-toe poster presentations from all of the year 1 teams. We enjoyed talking with the year 2 & 3 teams as they came around to visit. Many people were particularly interested in our “Child of Grace” Activity. This website lists the names and biographical information of nearly 50 children of the Holocaust. Using the Smart Board, students will choose a child of grace and read to determine if he or she was a survivor. Angel has utilized this website in her classroom and she shared with our visitors the incredible impact that it has had on her students. We learned a lot from speaking with the veteran UDL teams. Everyone was so willing to share their experiences with UDL and gave a lot of great advice. We wish we would have made more time to go around and talk with the other year 1 teams, but we will be able to look at their posters once they are posted on the PATINS web site.

The presentations from the year 2 & 3 teams were awesome! We got lots of great ideas for our action plan and technology requests, and how we can implement them in the classroom. It was great to see real examples of UDL in action.  We were particularly impressed that all of the presenters were from different types of schools, various demographics, and a wide spectrum of educators from beginning teachers to 30+ year veterans.  This was encouraging to us and gave us hope that eventually, we will be able to win over resistant staff members.  The resources that were presented are amazing.  We can’t wait to get started!

Our team is gearing up and getting ready for Collaboration Day on February 23. We met twice this week…on Wednesday and Friday…to put together our Tic-Tac-Toe Poster and to work on our lesson plan corrections. We are really happy with the way our poster turned out and are looking forward to seeing what other teams have done, too.

We were finally able to get the Smart Board up and running. This was an exercise in patience, but will be well worth it once we see the benefit it can be in the classroom. This smart board has been in our building for quite a while, but no one has used it because they either: a) don’t know how, or b) tried, but couldn’t figure it out. It has finally been determined that one of the cables was hooked up incorrectly, and viola! Now it works. Word of the working smart board has started to spread around the building…so now, several people have been stopping by to ask for a lesson on how to use it.

Kelly is also having a lot of success with the smart pen and has been using it to record student notes. Another technology tool that we are looking into are the hand-held smart pads. Our English department has a couple of these, but they are not being used because no one knows how. Erin has received permission to borrow one and play around with it a bit. Hopefully, once we get it figured out, we can provide other teachers with a tutorial on how to use it.

Welcome to our first blog! We are the East Side Middle School PATINS Team: Angel Alexander, Kelly Benson, Lucinda McCord, Erin Morgan, and Lucinda Weatherford. We are in our first year of training in the PATINS program to integrate UDL into our school. Our team had our weekly meeting on Wednesday, February 11 so we thought we would start out our new blogging adventure with an overview of what we discussed.

First, we looked over our lesson plan and worked on the changes that were suggested by our District Coordinator’s notes. Kelly is going to work on finalizing the corrections & additions, and Erin is going to email her a few more screen shots for some of the listed sites. We also discussed the use of the Smart Board and how to integrate this into our lesson plan. East Side has a Smart Board that is roughly ten years old; Erin has been working on trying to get it up and running, but is having trouble. Hopefully the problems will be remedied soon, as we are all excited about seeing it in action! Another tool that we looked at is our new Smart Pen. Kelly is excited about trying the pen out with one of her students for note-taking; this student writes fairly well, but has difficulty with reading and comprehending text.

We began working on our poster presentation for Collaboration Day on February 23. There was some confusion about the tic-tac-toe format, but Kelly helped clarify things a bit with some information that she found online. We agreed that we would all like to see some examples of how other PATINS teams have organized their posters. We all took a share of responsibility in planning the poster, and Angel had some particularly creative ideas that we all liked. We will be meeting again next Wednesday to put everything together.