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Showing posts from October, 2013

Typing: Then and Now

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Hi! I was looking for a document on my computer and I bumped into an essay I wrote back in 2008 for one of my graduate courses. I love to type and whenever I can I encourage students to learn it well, so I enjoyed the reminder of why I love it so much. Here's an extract of the paper which, by the way, was about Behaviorism Theory.   About the Teacher Mrs. Reyes had been in school for many years now; she was basically a teacher for the Commerce section. She had not studied to be an educator; she had studied to become a secretary and an accountant. She was dedicated to forming new secretaries and accountants. Unfortunately, the Commerce section at the school had to be closed down, and fortunately, she entered the secondary school faculty, hence, her experience with the course to be described. At the same time, she was the homeroom teacher for the same group of students. She was a nice, middle-aged woman at that time, with an only child: a twenty-year-old daughter.   Ab

Push Your Limits

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Hi! I spent last week in Mexico City, attending the 32nd Annual Tri-Association Educators' Conference 2013 . The theme of this year's conference was "Pushing Our Limits". In fact, every keynote and session was geared towards pushing us one step further at a time. With almost 1000 educators from different parts of the continent, there was a lot of learning happening and it turned out to be a very busy week. I truly enjoyed my time there: I had the opportunity to present a workshop on Social Networking in Schools: Edmodo. The attendees were amazed at how easy and safe it is to use Edmodo in schools with young students.  I attended the two day pre-conference session called "Understanding by Design" offered by one of the authors of this concept, Mr. Jay McTighe. A valuable take-away from this session is understanding what makes an Essential Question and how important it is to state them before starting a lesson. I attended a few other sessions, such as, C