Running Into the Future of Education

So I am embarking on my journey to use SBG in my classroom. I have started with my grade 8 classes in both math and physics. At first introduction (today was Day 1), the students seem interested in the idea though I know that weaning them (and their parents) from number grades on every assignment to feedback will take time. I have decided to start the year using the idea of green light, yellow light, red light for how they are doing on each standard. I have a feeling that I may need a wider scale, but will revisit this with the classes' feedback in a few weeks time. I wanted to share the standards I picked for both Math 8 and Physics 8; both based on Mexico's SEP curriculum. I am not sure if they are too general and I should be more specific. Please take a look and let me know what you think! Math 8: Understanding numbers, ways of representing numbers, relationships among numbers, and number systems  Understanding operations and how they relate to one another  Compute

As classes ended today and we have student led conferences left, I have moved on to yearly plans and first bimester (what a grading period is called here in Mexico) plans for next year. As I begin my journey into setting up an SBG classroom, I realized that my 1st step is looking through the curriculum and finding what standards I will work on during each bimester. I am using NCTM to help me with this as well since I need to translate from Spanish into English. I am also in the process of reorganizing the Mexican SEP curriculum into an order that will flow. Right now, they are integrating topics in a way that does not work well for me. I was given the go-ahead to reorder as long as I can show that I am still getting to all the ideas I should. After this, it is time to start finding #anyqs to create math stories with. I am using Dan Meyer's idea of the 1 acts as I plan these for math class. Also will probably use some in my physics class as well as other hands-on explorations.

I will start off my new edublog with a reposting of my top 6 take-aways from the ISTE11 conference which I just returned from. It was an amazing 4 days in Philly. So the last days have been filled with meeting lots of people... some new and some I already knew digitally (via Twitter and blogs), posters, presentations, discussions and the like. These are my 6 highlights so far: #6 - Walking around the exhibition hall and seeing presentations from many vendors including Google, Adobe, Livescribe and more. #5 - Volunteering at an ASK ME station on Sunday afternoon. After I finished I knew my way around this huge Philadelphia Convention Center. #4 - Attending sessions of all kinds, from ISTE Unplugged, Poster sessions, Google Educators talking about Google Apps for education, international initiatives of ISTE, Music and Tech (great presentation by people I follow on Twitter - lots of good ideas even for non music people), Learning Tools Family Feud (all the stuff was crowdsourced