A post a day for 10 days?

I saw this post from Tina Zita (@tina_zita) on my Twitter feed this morning, and thought... 'it's almost exam time, can I do this?'

If I start small, maybe.

So... what did I learn today? I finally learned how to use the spirometer. I've been at this school for longer than my grade 12's have been alive (kids born the year I started at this school are in their first year of university now), and I've never used the thing. Seriously, I could have searched Youtube for an instructional video - oh look, I found one!

But in the past, I've used other techniques to measure lung volumes, mostly involving balloons and mathematical approximations of volume. Maybe tomorrow I can post about how well it worked for my students...

Comments

Has it been 10 days yet?

Yup. I just counted from my first post, and it was on January 16, making today day 10. I missed a couple of days - both times I had begun writing, but didn't finish or didn't publish the draft - but I also double posted a couple of times, to try and catch up. Still, this is post number 8, on day 10. Not bad for a rookie, right? We started exams today, and since my first class doesn't write until Friday, I'm trying to be productive and mark their major lab reports before I have to start marking their exam papers. It's going slowly... #BellLetsTalk day is in full swing, making my phone buzz and my computer bong with alerts as people tweet and re-tweet. Yes, I am easily distracted when faced with a task I don't always enjoy. I also wrote a reference letter for a former student who is applying to the SickKids Summer Research Program , and its deadline is before my mark-entry deadline, so I justified writing it before grading papers, too. Just imagine if ...

No buses... so now what?

For the second time in as many weeks (both Tuesdays, I might add...) we've had buses cancelled due to inclement weather. Sometimes, these days can be a blessing, as when a number of students are bussed in, we have few in the building and it may be an opportunity to catch up on paperwork, the dreaded grading that we all try to minimize and still manage to collect too much of... but this close to January exams, I'd rather be able to work with my students and help them study and review the semester's content. I had 4 students in my grade 11 class, and we took up the answers to the genetics problems test they wrote last week. One student in grade 12? He's taking samples from the lab we set up yesterday ( using dialysis tubing to model the small intestine ) so the next class can use the equipment tomorrow. What about me? Did I make good use of my time? I copied my grade 11 exam and delivered it to the main office for safe-keeping until my students write it n...

Planning ahead and Prezi

I discovered Prezi about six years ago at a PD-instead-of-a-staff meeting session. One of my colleagues shared resources to use with PowerPoint, and another introduced us to Prezi. I'd never seen it - I don't do a lot of in-class presentations (by students) so it was a cool new tool for me at the time when it didn't give me vertigo. I still use it sometimes... I have Prezis that I like (and some that I don't) . I prefer Prezi for teaching single topic or concept - anything that would take multiple days in class, I veer towards Google Slides more often than not. Here's one I use for introducing IB diploma programme courses to our grade 10 students: There are a lot more built-in templates than there were when I first used it, and I recently received an email from the developers with a "school planning calendar for 2017". It looked good for highlighting key dates in a month, so I thought I'd give it a try. The only thing is... everything we do ...

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