Life In Notes

Growing up, I loved music.  I tried a few different things on for size while I was going to school for my bachelor’s degree, but nothing really stuck.  I did some work in radio, which I loved, and I did not stop pushing until I had the opportunity to work in the music industry.  I held a few different specialized positions in marketing while working in the music business.  I enjoyed the work immensely, but in the early 2000’s, the bottom fell out of the industry, and I was left trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.  After working in music, I had stints in banking, non-profit work and restaurant marketing. By the time I reached my forties, I wondered if restaurant marketing was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.  The thought terrified me.  I could not imagine the next twenty years of my life going to an office, making phone calls, sending emails and working on spreadsheets.  It seemed like a terrible existe...

Encanto is a film that makes me think of the pandemic in that the first time I watched it was with my family as we were huddled together in quarantine.  During quarantine, new releases on streaming services became appointment viewing.  We would wait for new releases to occupy our time as there wasn't much new content being released and no one was going to movie theaters. I would have loved to have gone to the movie screening at Rhode Island College as it would have been nice to see everyone in person and had the opportunity to discuss Encanto in a group setting through different lenses.  It was not meant to be as I had to work that evening. When I originally watched Encanto with my family, it was for entertainment.  It was a fun film with a family of Latino heritage and catchy songs.  It was not a film that I gave much of a second thought to outside of hearing "We Don't Talk About Bruno" on the radio a million times in the months following. After reading Linda ...

I was drawn to the piece, "School Days: Hail, Hail, Rock 'n' Roll!" by Rick Mitchell because the beginning of my non-teaching career was in the music industry.  I worked for Sony Music for eight and a half years at the start of my working life.  It was a fantastic and magical time that ended in 2003 when the music industry bubble "burst" with the explosion of Napster.  I found myself on the outside looking in on something I had hoped would go on forever.  Music was and has always been an important part of who I am, so I incorporate music in my fourth-grade classroom.  Rick Mitchell does the same, in his high school classroom. Rick Mitchell was a professional rock critic for years before he became a teacher.  He explained that he "outgrew the mysterious joy and pride I once had found in telling people that the music they enjoyed actually sucked."  At that point he had a "desperate epiphany cleverly disguised as altruism" in which he made ...

Pixton  is a comic creation tool.  Pixton is thoughtful in design and thorough in its offerings (as long as you upgrade your subscription).  The free version is limited in the offerings of backdrops and avatars, but everything is available with a monthly or yearly subscription (I chose yearly for $99).  Comic-building tools are unbelievably easy to use and simple click-and-drag actions let students create and customize all parts of their comic.  Students can even upload photos to their comic.  Students can also share their comic online, download and print them.  Teachers will  enjoy the platform because it gets students to write and create narratives through the scope of comics and graphic novels.  Teachers can also create specific assignments that are tied into literature that may be read in class (they even have backdrops for "The Diary of Anne Frank"). Pixton has won multiple awards (Webby, People’s Choice, Digital Media and Common Se...

I believe that students learn from people that they like. I believe that connections (or relationships) are the entry point for learning. I believe that classroom management becomes easier when there are connections with home and students feel as though there are consequences for their actions. I believe that students need to feel loved. I believe that students need encouragement and praise .   I believe that students thrive when given safe spaces to work. I believe that each student is different and that we (as educators) need to try to understand these differences and scaffold as much as possible. I believe that learning should be fun. I believe that learning should be challenging. My final project is going to be about using technology to build stronger relationships with families.  I have a website where my personal portfolio sits, so I am going to create a page every year for my class.  I will post student work, videos, photos, Student of the Month, etc., while ...

After viewing "Build A School In The Cloud", the Ted Talk from Sugata Mitra, I had many thoughts rush over me.  Why are teachers even in a classroom?  Is what we do meaningless?  Can a computer teach students?  I had A LOT of questions.  But as I began to think about the questions some more, I inherently knew the answers to all of these questions. Schools were created over three hundred years ago by the British Empire.  The technology back then, as mentioned by Mitra was the bureaucratic machine.  It was technology built by people.  If you were able to read and write, had neat handwriting and were able to add, subtract, multiply and divide...you could be a part of something bigger than yourself. Technology has changed throughout the years as have the ways that we use technology.  My technology growing up in the late 70's and early 80's was vastly different than the technology that is used today.  That said, people find a way to adapt wi...

After spending time listening to the Ted Talk of Sherry Turkle called "Connected, but alone?" and reading the article " Anti-Teaching: Confronting The Crisis Of Significance " by Michael Wesch, my initial thoughts were that there wasn't much of a connection between the two theories.  Turkle discusses how we have an entire society of people that are immersed in whatever is on their phones.  We live our lives on screens.  Wesch meanwhile questions the significance of teaching vs. learning and whether students in college consider anything taught in a huge lecture hall important to actually learn. As I thought about it more, I started to understand how these two pieces were interconnected.  My youngest son Aidan is thirteen years old.  He suffers from ADHD with some anxiety and depression thrown in.  We knew there was something different with the way his brain process things from a very young age, but we weren't able to get a true diagnosis (he was always too ...