Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

I am engrossed in planning my school year, with Marzano's "Classroom Management that Works" book as my guide. Meanwhile, Doug Noon has created a great template for writing your letter to your Senators about DOPA. How Senators look at feedback From my days as an aide in Senator Nunn's office, I will tell you that letters and e-mails do count. When I worked there, we kept tally sheets for all house bills and issues. We marked every phone call and contact on these sheets along with any notes and selected the letter that would be returned. We also passed along any letters of significance up "the food chain" to see if there was need for a more customized response. When voting came up, we provided the Senator with a tally sheet on what his constituents were saying. The point is, you need to get people to call, write, and e-mail their senator. Here is the directory of Senators . Distraction I remember in Robin Hood when Kevin Costner jostled a little boy who wa...

Consider the lobster . When it is in warm water, it frequently molts its shell. A new, very soft shell grows underneath its new one. When it is time, the lobster begins to literally shrink as it expels seawater and the old shell begins to split. After going through this gruelling process, a lobster emerges with a new soft shell. With a soft shell, it must literally hid in its borough for one to two weeks or it will be easy prey for fish and other predators. Growth and molting are an important part of the growth process of the lobster with even the eyes of the lobster shedding their covering. Without molting, the old shell would become the lobster's coffin. Growth and change are part of life Change is the only constant in our world. In America, in the warm waters of democracy and prosperity, things change rapidly. It requires us to shed our old modes of thinking and to adopt new methodologies and paradigms in order to understand the new world. We must understand, act, and ad...

There are a lot of folks TALKING about DOPA but not many have read the bill . I want to go on the record and tell you exactly where I have issues. (I feel that I need to do this since CNN and TechCrunch have posted my blogging against DOPA!) Following is the actual text of the Bill and my comments. Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House) 109th CONGRESS 2d Session H. R. 5319 AN ACT To amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms. Acceptable Use policies handle many of these issues. Currently, schools have Acceptable Use policies which detail how they expect school computers to be used. This includes instructions that school computers are not to be used for pornography, commercial enterprise, etc. Every school that I am aware of blocks Instant Messaging, Myspace , Xanga , and Facebook . What ...

DOPA passed in the US House of Representatives last night 410 - 15. Texas Republican Ted Poe says, “social networking sites such as MySpace and chat rooms have allowed sexual predators to sneak into homes and solicit kids.” The DOPA legislation (Deleting Online Predators Act) will not prevent sexual predators from sneaking into homes, it will increase it, in my opinion. In fact, one of my students says it best on her personal blog, "The only way to protect children from online predators is to arm them with the information to protect themselves. In fact, probably the best place for kids to have access to these sites is in school where they can be monitored. Not to mention all the educational benefits that come from these sites these lawmakers are trying to ban. Wikis are the new way to do classroom collaboration. Blogs are the new way to do classroom discussion. So no, DOPA is not protecting the children, in fact, all it is doing is hurting them by continuing to promote the idea...

If you don't know where you're going, how will you know when you get there? Planning is vital to good teaching. If you are a teacher that cannot seem to get it all done, you probably don't have a year long plan. Planning is not just daily, you have to start with long term planning. Why do we plan? With my business background, I learned that we needed a strategic plan (3-5 years or longer), a tactical plan (a year or less), and a short term plan (the month.) Then, those of us in departments would take the goals for the month and translate it into what we would do daily. I am a HUGE believer in effective planning. Schools should plan, departments should plan, and classrooms should plan. They should fit together. Those who plan up front sometimes look like they are coasting during the year. Actually, my daily and weekly planning requires much less cogitation because I know where I need to be by looking at my longer range plans! 3 - Create the plan Plan for the year -...

Yesterday, I started my ponderings of the three principles that I use in my classroom. First, was setting the pace . Today I'll talk about establishing the flow of people, paper, and information. Tomorrow I'll cover establishing the plan. I hope you'll take time to read the comments on these posts, I'm impressed with those who want to contribute to these thoughts with some very important points. I hope you'll share your insights as well. 2 - Establish the flow: people flow, paper flow, information flow People flow - When you look at your room layout, you should think about how students will enter the room, turn in their work, receive papers back, and exit the room. Are the bins to hand in work near the printer? If the textbook stays in the classroom, is it to be put on a shelf near the door? Also, how many steps are you from each student when you are teaching? When you are at your desk? I strive for 3-4 steps to each s...

Stuck in downtown Camilla rush minute traffic yesterday, I pondered the beginning of the school year. The one frustrating thing about teaching is that sometimes you feel like you're putting your hand in a bucket of water... when you take your hand out, you don't see the mark. It is a very "what have you done for me lately" profession and each year we start over. But we cannot be discouraged! Nature gives us insight into our profession. If you look at my beautiful hydrangeas, last year's bloom is still is a reminder of beauty. Although it is brown and faded, it is still lovely in its own regard and a reminder of how well I watered and fertilized the plant last year. It is like the last school year. I have reminders of how great things went in the past. But also like my hydrangea, the most beautiful creation is this year's new growth. Teaching is very much a present profession. The greatest gifts of teaching are accomplishments in the present moment. The breakt...

Some high school kids 30 minutes up the road from me are about to be famous.. very famous. In less than sixty days their movie will be released in 400 theaters nationwide. Facing the Giants was made famous mostly because of its PG rating. The author/directors/star, brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick, expected a PG rating because of the football scenes and a frank discussion of teen pregnancy, but instead, it was handed down for religious content. This made the news, but they haven't fought the rating, although many outspoken people have. But this is not about religion. This topic belongs on my education blog. Let me tell you the story of this film first. These two brothers loved to make movies since they were kids. When they attended college together as communications majors at Kennesaw State University , they convinced professors to allow them to submit videos instead of term papers and exams. They graduated and moved on to New Orleans Theological Seminary (Atlanta branch) w...

I haven't been posting much because I've been "living" at the school (8 - 5 and 6-9 daily) trying to put in a new lab, get all of the teachers set, and get myself set. My workshop on Wikis I have received confirmation from the folks at GAETC that my workshop proposal has been accepted. I will be teaching "Easy and Engaging Teaching Using Wikis" on Tuesday, November 14th from 1- 4 pm . We have room for 20 people and I hope there are some educators who are interested in wikis. SDU credit is available for participants. I am excited about this workshop and plan to model the wiki teaching method in the class. As a product of the class, we will produce a great wiki for educators about how wikis can be used in the classroom. I also plan to have each participant create their own wiki to take back to their classroom. Of all of the new tools I've used, I adore wikis. They are engaging and they create experts in a very short amount of time. I will be inte...

As I put my brain on autopilot and sailed off on a Disney Cruise, the last thing I expected was to learn something about education, but my classroom will be different because of it. Why on earth would my kids join a "lab" at sea? When I pre-enrolled my 10 and 11 year old in the "Oceaneer Lab ", the "market-teer" in me said skeptically, "Don't they know anything about kids, Lab sounds too much like school and they don't want to do school on a cruise ship." However, it was aptly named "Lab." When I arrived the kids found an incredible computer island, a wall of microscopes, an animation center, video games (many educational), three televisions with comfy beanbag chairs, and stations for building and making things. Fun music played in the background and the areas were lit with varied and appropriate lighting for the activities taking place there. I checked them in, put on my pager, and expected to receive a call from them in minu...