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Friday, February 14, 2014

MRVED Business

MRVED Business
Principals' Council
The Principals' Council finally met again on Wednesday after missing the January meeting due to weather.  After meeting monthly all year, this was the final meeting of the principals until the joint meeting with the TAC in April.  The principal group has been working on a variety of topics all year including providing effective feedback, effective teaching strategies, and teacher evaluation.


MRVED Meetings:
February 20, 2014  Teachers' Advisory Council (TAC)
February 26, 2014  Superintendents' Council
March 4, 2014        Agriculture
March 6, 2014        Industrial Technology

Growing Professionally

Growing Professionally
Are you looking for a way to grow professionally.  Here is a list of some organizations and websites that can help you learn about a variety of topics.  In most cases, membership to these organization is fairly reasonable or offer a portion for free.  If you are not a member, check out any conferences they organize.

Tech Tip

TalkTyper
Do you have students that struggle to type? Have them try TalkTyper. TalkTyper provides Speech Recognition absolutely free. It makes voice dictation freely available to "the rest of us". Anyone with a computer can use it. That's why we made it!

How it works

Click the microphone icon and begin speaking. Dictate about one sentence at a time. When the speech is recognized, it will appear in red.

If you want to hear it, click on the Speaker icon.

If your speech wasn't recognized correctly, click the Alternatives button to view other 'recognitions', or just try again. If the text is okay, click the Okay button, and your text will be added to the box at the bottom.

When you're all done, click the Copy button and then paste it into your document, email, blog, or tweet! (If the copy button doesn't work for you, remember that the shortcut for copying is "Ctrl-C")


Brandon's Brainwork- High Expectations

High Expectations
Having high expectations for all students is critical in receiving quality work from your students.  I was reminded of this recently when my daughter (who is in Kindergarten), was sitting watching a movie and out of the blue decided to tell me "dad, do you know your prefrontal cortex is the front of your brain and the hippocampus is behind your ears?"  This statement totally blew me away, but it got me thinking about having high expectations for all students.

Most teachers would say they have high expectations for their students, but closer examination may reveal that this is not true.  A simple, yet effective, task could be going through your class list and identifying those students that you may or may not have high expectations for.  After identifying students, then being cognizant of how you interact with each of the students.

A great resource on creating and communicating high expectations for all students comes from The Department of Safe Schools, Single School Culture for Academics, from The School District of Palm Beach County, FL.  It is based on the Marzano framework, is short and to the point, and has lots of great information about high expectations.

Communicating High Expectations for All Students from The School District of Palm Beach County, FL

I also like to refer to Austin's Butterfly when talking about high expectations.  This teacher has high expectations for his/her students and it shows!

Questions to Consider
1. Do I really have high expectations for all students?
2. Do I accept mediocre work, just because it's easier?
3. Do my actions or words show my expectations of my students?