Labor Day Weekend Learnings

This week had a lot of new resources to help on my quest to grow as a math teacher.  So many resources in fact, that I kept getting side tracked and instead of completing my Baker assignments, I was adapting the strategies I was finding in order to use them in my own classroom.  This means that I am scrambling to finish up the last pieces of my assignments while I'm in Wichita Falls, TX for a Labor Day meet-up with my girlfriend.

This week started with me getting back on my Diigo account.  I say, "getting back on" because I actually used Diigo in an Integrating Technology in the Classroom class I took as an undergrad student.  This class was over 4 years ago so a lot has changed on Diigo since my last visit.  My absolute favorite new feature was Diigo Discover.  This new addition allowed me to search through education related articles shared by the Diigo community and it didn't take long for me to find one I used in my class.  I found an article relating happiness to social media usage and I shared this article with my Algebra II class because we started the year with a unit over statistics and surveys.  The content of the article (found here if you're interested) was interesting but I was mainly wanting to show my students the graphs and survey questions used by the authors.  If you want more information on how to use Diigo, check out this video.

In addition to getting back on Diigo, I also dusted off my Twitter account I made the semester of my student teaching.  For being only 25, I feel old in my lack of Twitter knowledge, so my first tweet in 3 years had to acknowledge that:
My posting skills will be my biggest area of concern, but I'm really good at people watching so finding new teachers and groups to follow was easy.  There are so many good strategies out there being shared among math teachers and I spent more time thinking about how to adapt things I found for use in my classes than I did actually doing my Twitter assignment for class.

One assignment for this week had me hunting for some websites to build my PLN (Personal Learning Network) and I stumbled across a new website called We Are Teachers that I really liked. It has some great articles for teachers of any subject or age and my favorite part was that they share articles related to helping teachers keep their sanity.  Whether it's tips on how to stay organized, or a whole section dedicated to teacher humor, this site has something to offer anyone.  If you want a laugh, check out this article titled 27 Back to School Memes That Will Have You Saying "Same".

That's all I got for this week, so I'm going to go back to enjoying Wichita Falls.  If you haven't been here you totally should.  I wasn't sure what to expect but it just happened to be a half-way meeting spot for my girlfriend and I and it has been a very pleasant surprise.  For a "smaller" city, they have something for everyone to enjoy!

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