You can roll with this, or you can roll with that.

Webquest project. Should I make it look good, or should I concentrate on the material inside?
Shouldn't a webquest have visual appeal? I mean, seriously, the ones that we had to research in class all looked like garbage. The information was good, but they all kind of looked like interactive worksheets. If I am going to make a webquest that will be implemented in class, I would at least want it to look appealing to the kids.

Also, sending a kid out searching for information could be disastrous. My biggest concern is not being able to prepare the kids enough (if I am going to use this) with the skills needed to perform a basic search. We all know one kid is going to end up on a site that has ads for Viagra or on-line dating. Calming down the class could take a lot of valuable time.

I don't feel like I have enough time to implement something of this caliber because I feel it supplements a lesson. Our scope and sequence is tight enough as it is. Lord knows what happened last year with all those snow days. I have to make sure if I am going to use this, that the Webquest is finished when that class day is.
Doesn't that suck?
I attended the meetings for scope and sequence and all that was decided was how urgent we can cram all of these topics into our kids heads. There are maybe 12 days set aside the whole year for assessment and the rest is teaching information that could be truly learned if there was more time.
Maybe if sixth grade math were taught in a way that the kid would remember it, we wouldn't have to use three quarters of seventh grade math re-teaching all of the same topics.

There's no time. Education looks like a factory. Here are the topics you can squeeze into one year. Here is a test at the end.
GO!

Getting Bored with the Board

My Promethean board is getting boring. I would love to see the board go beyond its present limitations.

It's like every current Adam Sandler movie ... it has the potential to be good, but just ... isn't.

There is nothing exciting about a "container". In fact, it takes way too long to set up those stupid things for five seconds of flip chart use.
It would be cool if the board did fun stuff that the SmartBoard software already has. For example, the smartboard has these rotating boxes that you could put a question on the front and have it spin around to the answer. You can also imbed and hide items in a Notebook file. It's all simple, interactive Flash programming.
Imagine being able to grab the corners of a picture of a cube and rotate it any which way. I know it can be done. Why hasn't it?

These things create a more interactive learning atmosphere. The ability to make a boring topic, visually appealing will at least grab the students' attention and hopefully lead them to listening.
I did get to sample the ActivExpressions. I've been batting around the idea of taking them from the library and the kids will always have one in front of them. Then always allow them to text in their answer. Or use them for formative types of assessment.

The more I try to make my classroom feel less like a classroom, the more students I believe will learn.

I also think carpeted rooms would help for some reason. Nothing fancy. Maybe a nice Egyptian blue carpet ... maybe with a little Feldgrau mixed in there to keep a calm tone.