I love Pinky and the Brain. For those of you who have never watched the cartoon the premise is that two laboratory mice try to take over the world after the lab closes for the evening. Brain comes up with the plans and usually fails. Pinky follows along and either screws everything up or does something miraculous. Pinky is a bit more of a free spirit and Brain is more structured. It has recently occurred to me that I have taken on quite a bit of responsibility. For some reason I subconsciously have decided to fix the culture of my school, the lack of technology integration in my district, the unaligned social studies curriculum, and the lack of homework being completed by my students. I have been very Brain lately. It seems like every initiative I have tried seems to fail in some sort of way. Crazy and overwhelmed doesn't even begin to describe how I felt on the last day of school. Usually, the last day of school is supposed to be a relief. The weight of the school year is supposed to lift off your shoulders and the freedom of summer should wash over you. That's not what I was feeling on June 20th.
The summer ahead is filled with activities that I hope will help me become a better teacher. I plan on researching better teaching methods, take a course or two, re write my curriculum, and among other things. One of which is designing a Flipped Classroom course for teachers to take. I attended a workshop back in May, but I was disappointed in the lack of depth the workshop went into. I had so many questions, and I felt like non of them were answered. It's my goal to design a course that has teachers examine the flipped classroom model including the pros and cons and create their own unit of flipped lessons.
At this point I am just collecting resources. There is so much information available that it is hard to choose which platform is best, which articles are most informative, and how teachers will use it in their own class.
So much to do and so little time to do it in!
