Everyone Needs Feedback!

I don't know if you celebrated that your end of year T-TESS was complete, but as I met with my last teacher, I did a little celebration dance! It wasn't pretty figuring out T-TESS and I am already thinking of ways to improve, but it wasn't awful either. In some ways I will miss how it provided the opportunity for us to sit and talk uninterrupted for forty to fifty minutes. I will miss getting to hear you brag on all the little things you all do to make Sendera Ranch the best place on earth to "do school."...aww #warmfuzzies. That is, until the next T-TESS cycle.

Seriously, it was a good experience and process for many reasons for me. I believe it was a good experience and process for you as well. However I am not completely naive to think John and I don't have places to improve. Some we are completely aware; others, we are not. This is where we need your help. In the next few days, while the end of year conferences are still fresh on your mind, we would like you to fill out a feedback survey for us.
We have made it virtually anonymous (we did ask for you to tell us who your evaluator was so we could continue to calibrate and align our approach).

Here is the link: https://goo.gl/forms/4NOeLixjIdZio3Y33

We would love to hear what you think, how you believe the process went according to your perspective, and ways we can improve.

Thanks so much for taking the time to help us grow, be better and make this a process that is beneficial for us all!

How Will You Finish Strong?

The spring brings all kinds of life and liveliness into every part of our personal lives and our classrooms. Benefits of spring are warmer weather, longer days, and the beauty of everything in bloom. It is also the last leg of the race in a school year. The time when we are seeing the fruits of the work we have invested in our students and the realities that our hard work may not have yielded the growth in some of our students we had worked for, hoped for and lost sleep over.

It is hard not to focus in our reflections on our professional practice where things haven't quite turned out how we had pictured. We can mourn for the hope of where we thought we would be, but we can't camp out there. This is where we must focus on the growth, what we have accomplished, the progress. It is in this that we put into practice the growth mindset. It is where we remember last August when we came together as a staff and started our 2016-17 year talking about how having a growth mindset and how that allows us to move forward... even in our moments of disappointment or mistakes... we "fail forward."

As we contemplate and reflect, how can we finish this year confidently and positively? How can we finish strong?

As this week's blog post topic was swirling around in my head, I realized this belief that "finishing strong" is critical had everything to do with maintaining a healthy campus culture. So I called on our resident health expert, Nurse Amanda Wiggans. With calendar in hand, we took the idea of the from the 21 Day Challenge in January (http://srelonghornlearning.blogspot.com/2017/02/happiness-mindfulness-and-classroom.html), and turned to our best resources... Google and Pinterest. What Amanda determined is that there were exactly 30 days left with students starting April 17th. What she also discovered is that there are a lot of resources to support a 30 Day Positivity Challenge. Wheels began turning... Positive Thinking + Positive Talk= Healthy Culture/Staff....

AND... drum roll please, when we have a Healthy Culture/Staff WE ARE GUARANTEED to FINISH STRONG!

The great thing is no one has to go and come up with ideas to participate in the 30 Day Positivity Challenge. We are providing the ideas for you (thanks to Nurse Amanda Wiggans!).

Here are 30 Suggestions for each of the next 30 School Days:

Some alternates in case you might want a substitute for one of the days:

Write a list of reasons why you love someone (and give it to them)
Leave a funny note in a library book to make someone smile.
Compliment a stranger.
Tell 3 people you admire something about them. Additionally, if you love memes, why not share via social media a quote from a fictional teacher or mentor? Fun and Funny... How can you beat that for positivity??? Here is a list of fun fictional quotes:

Feel free to share via Social Media what you are doing each day or a meme you have created from the quotes as your part in participating in the positivity challenge. Tag your posts with #SREisAwesome #FinishStrong #30DayChallenge If you have more ideas that you would like to share or simply want to leave your thoughts regarding the 30 Day Positivity Challenge... please comment below! (Special thanks to Beverly and Amanda W. for providing the idea and resources for this week's post!)

Are Our Digital Natives Digitally Literate?

This week our Technology Leadership Team met to develop a vision for technology integration at Sendera Ranch Elementary. We discussed that we have digital natives who interact constantly with technology but yet lack the skills to find, filter and create digital products... they lack digital literacy.

Knowing the need to foster and facilitate digital literacy in our students the Technology Literacy team, through a collaborative process developed our vision that took into account the future skills our students will need, the vertical alignment of skills so that students can progress with technology for academic use/learning. The committee also took into account where we presently are as a campus and what our next steps should be with our technology integration.

We can all agree that students must have strong literacy and math skills to be successful in life. What we are finding is that in order for students to function successfully in life they must also become digitally literate. It is in their life. They were born surrounded by it. How they use technology as learners... that is where our job lies.

Beyond the vision the technology leadership team came up with goals for the campus. These goals may seem big if one was attempting to do it all at one time. However, just like when we teach students to read or develop number sense, we do it in small steps, bit by bit.

Knowing these are the goals for our campus for next year, what are the ways you can look ahead and backwards plan. How can opportunities for students to learn some of the "soft skills" with technology early on, so that students can enter into larger more involved projects with confidence and skills to create work that reflects not just their technology skills but their depth of understanding?

In an eSchool News  article it discusses the ten skills every student should learn. They were:
1. Read
2. Type
3. Write
4. Communicate effectively and with respect
5. Question
6. Be resourceful
7. Be accountable
8. Know how to learn
9. Think critically
10. Be happy

Technology can be the antithesis of these or it can be the vehicle that gets them there. We have the power to make that happen. The most important thing we can do is provide exposure through experiences and modeling. A quick article that may help to brainstorm ways to reach that is mentioned in the blog post: Finding Time for Tech by Katie Currens.

Another great resource is the US Digital Literacy website: http://digitalliteracy.us/. This has great resources to utilize and shares digital skills that students need to be successful citizens.

Finally, the district created a check list of technology skills for K-2 and 3-5 that is directly taken form the Technology TEKS. This is a great tool to use as a guideline as we move forward and vertically support one another as we develop our students' digital literacy.

What are ways you and/or your team are intentionally planning to meet the goals developed from our technology vision? Share your ideas!