This is a busy time of year, I get that. We are actively engaged in getting to know our students, planning our units, and just getting by one day at a time. And with the new initiatives this year, teachers are being asked to learn a new technology platform for work as we switch over to Google, and you're being asked to reimagine how you work with your colleagues and students as we implement a new RTI model in our district.
So without trying to create "one more thing" for us to do, I wanted to send out an invite to all language arts teachers to participate in a collaborative project that would help improve the way you do guided reading in class. All teachers, to some degree, struggle with making guiding reading activities good for all kids in the class at all times. From my point of view, the better you can engage your students in centres for guided reading time, the less management issues you will have and the better you will be able to work with the group of students you are with for that day.
As such, I want to invite teachers to join a collaborative project that would have us collectively creating shared activities that teachers could use for centres during guided reading time. In order to do this, we will be using our new Google Drives that come with the new platform. You can see in the picture on the left there is an icon with nine little boxes. By clicking on it, you access the apps seen on the side. If you click on Drive, which is the blue, green and yellow one, you will access your personal drive that will have all of your documents that are saved in the cloud. You will manage it just like you would manage a USB stick or another folder on your computer. The only difference is that it is stored entirely in the cloud.
Once you access your Drive, you will have a screen that will allow you to create folders and documents that you can use to teach, plan or work with colleagues. In the image below, you will see that I have a number of folders that I have created for different things. The one highlighted in blue will be the one we will use to share our Literacy Centres and jointly work on building a repertoire of activities that all of us can access and use for doing guiding reading in our classes.
So without trying to create "one more thing" for us to do, I wanted to send out an invite to all language arts teachers to participate in a collaborative project that would help improve the way you do guided reading in class. All teachers, to some degree, struggle with making guiding reading activities good for all kids in the class at all times. From my point of view, the better you can engage your students in centres for guided reading time, the less management issues you will have and the better you will be able to work with the group of students you are with for that day.
As such, I want to invite teachers to join a collaborative project that would have us collectively creating shared activities that teachers could use for centres during guided reading time. In order to do this, we will be using our new Google Drives that come with the new platform. You can see in the picture on the left there is an icon with nine little boxes. By clicking on it, you access the apps seen on the side. If you click on Drive, which is the blue, green and yellow one, you will access your personal drive that will have all of your documents that are saved in the cloud. You will manage it just like you would manage a USB stick or another folder on your computer. The only difference is that it is stored entirely in the cloud.
Once you access your Drive, you will have a screen that will allow you to create folders and documents that you can use to teach, plan or work with colleagues. In the image below, you will see that I have a number of folders that I have created for different things. The one highlighted in blue will be the one we will use to share our Literacy Centres and jointly work on building a repertoire of activities that all of us can access and use for doing guiding reading in our classes.
Once you click on the Literacy Centres folder, you will access the folder and it will look like this:
As you can see, there are a number of folders that will house activities you can use as centres during guiding reading. As of now, each of those folders are empty. But as we start collaborating and working on this together, we will collectively populate those folders with files of activities that we use or develop to use with our students. And because we have the ability to share this information through our Drives, any teacher that wants to join this project can have access to it.
My request at this time is that you let me know if you would like to be part of the project that will populate these folders, or new folders we could create, of activities that we can share and use with our students during guided reading centres and activities in class. We already have a few teachers committed to participating on this. So if you want to be part of the project, and benefit from accessing this shared material for your class, please comment on this post or send me an email request and I will share these files with you so that you can access them through your new work email.
I look forward to hearing from you :D
Cheers.
Ryan
P.S. I just had surgery yesterday and the doctor said that the anaesthesia could make me groggy and unable to think and communicate clearly. So if my post doesn't make sense, please understand the context in which I wrote it :D
My request at this time is that you let me know if you would like to be part of the project that will populate these folders, or new folders we could create, of activities that we can share and use with our students during guided reading centres and activities in class. We already have a few teachers committed to participating on this. So if you want to be part of the project, and benefit from accessing this shared material for your class, please comment on this post or send me an email request and I will share these files with you so that you can access them through your new work email.
I look forward to hearing from you :D
Cheers.
Ryan
P.S. I just had surgery yesterday and the doctor said that the anaesthesia could make me groggy and unable to think and communicate clearly. So if my post doesn't make sense, please understand the context in which I wrote it :D