Teaching Mrs. Ryan

I just wanted to throw out a quick updated post about Voki.  I had a few days before school let out for the holidays to try Voki out with my students.  I made a cute little Voki to introduce the lesson: Terribly Cute isn't it! My plan was to have my students make their own Voki and talk me through a math problem.  I wanted to try something simple at first and then we will work on building what I can do with it later.  * I found it MUCH simpler to purchase Voki for my classroom.  I believe it was $30 for a year. * The one downfall I found was that students could only have 1 Voki each.  So they couldn't make several... bummer. The students LOVED creating their own Voki.  The crazier the better.  I had one student make a politically charged word problem with his Voki.  It made me laugh and I loved seeing their creativity come out. It really is hard as a math teacher to come up with different ways for students to use those critica...

With the recent tragedy in Connecticut affecting our nation, as a teacher it raised a lot of questions for me about my classroom safety.   Of course the school has procedures in place for a campus emergency, but how safe are we really?  A more passive educator stated at lunch the day the tragedy occurred that maybe now the government would re-look at gun issues.  I stated yes, wouldn't it be nice if we were armed for a change.  He actually looked stunned.  I nicely explained to him that I could protect myself just about anywhere I go, until I come on a school campus, and then I'm defenseless.  What if select teachers were trained for such an emergency situation?  It need not be EVERY teacher, and it need not be anything other teachers know about.  Much like what was done in churches when gunmen were storming in and shooting parishioners, much like that plain closed air marshal on a plane protecting you when you fly.   Maybe this is ...

After 1/2 a week in the classroom I have pretty good reviews to report about Live Binders .  For those that didn't read my last post about the conference I just attended, I'll give a brief synopsis.  I learned a lot of cool free and some not so free technology apps and programs to use in the classroom.  My goal was to integrate all of these different types of programs into my lesson plans here and there to spice up life a little bit.  One of the programs I introduced this week is Live Binders.  LB is essentially a virtual 3 ring binder that you can add notes, documents, and websites to.  I wanted to introduce this tool to my students to give them a way to organize their notes, and encourage them to discover new resources for class.    Even better; LB has a free app for the iPad.  Here is a little video from their site: Here is what I've learned so far: Some students took to this program like a duck to water.  They were ...

     It has been a busy time since I last posted about my NCTM conference.  Since then I've gotten my students hooked on Mathletics and we have successfully added Mathletics to our curriculum arsenal.  Currently I am using Mathletics as a warm-up for students in the classroom, but we are also using activities and lesson plans to get students engaged in learning in a whole new way.   Just after getting Mathletics on board in school, I headed to another conference.  This time I went to a Differentiating Instruction conference held by SDE .        Honestly, I wasn't really excited about this conference.  (1) During my graduate program and even during undergraduate studies, that is all you are taught.  You are taught to differentiate instruction and how it needs to happen, ways it needs to happen, and why it needs to happen.  DI, DI, DI... do it is what that needed to stand for.  (2) My collea...