Challenge Accepted: O is for Offer Support

The O is for Offer Support Challenge was a favorite of mine. As I read, learn, and access resources, I enjoy sharing them! This challenge allowed me to grow as a learner as well as provide staff meaningful resources.

I have three teachers that are in different places with work on professional reflection blogs. Two teachers have established blogs and another is working on developing hers. All three of them would benefit from some inspiration for topics to write about. As I was working on my own blog posts, I ran across an article that was a 30 day blog challenge. I emailed the link to the staff with a list of the 5 blog post inspiration ideas that I felt would best align to their personalities and strengths as a teacher. By reading this blog post, I also was inspired to do several

A 30 Day Blog Challenge at http://www.teachthought.com/uncategorized/reflective-teaching-30-day-blogging-challenge-teachers/

 Several of my teachers received OSMO devices as a companion tool to their iPads. These have been in our building for just a month. I followed up with a team of teachers that have the devices with ideas for implementation from Pinterest. In addition, I placed an order for the math number tiles to support their implementation of it in the math setting.

Ideas for the Implementation of OSMO Device with the iPad https://www.pinterest.com/PlayOsmo5/kids-osmo/ 

I have a new special education teacher that is experienced in literacy instruction, but is new to a specific intervention we use in our district. During a walk-through I was able to talk to her about her level of comfort with the program and learned that she felt stifled by the rigidity of the program. Knowing that she would benefit from the online learning community and inter-activities that are available, I sent her a link to the SMARTboard files and followed up with customer service to get her access to the training modules, videos, and discussion community. This saved her the time and effort of locating the customer service number, making the call, and creating an account. By taking that on for her, I opened up time for her to focus on instruction and preparation.

Just Words Reading Intervention Resources http://www.wilsonlanguage.com/professional-learning/learning-communities/ilc/

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In addition to personalized resources shared to specific teachers, I have found ways to embed access to resources in a few additional ways:

1. In addition to these personalized resources, I have been adding articles, quotes, and ideas to the walls and mirrors in the staff bathroom. After reading, “Personalized PD” I wanted to take advantage of literal ‘down’ times for teachers to engage in professional reading and reflection.
2. In my weekly memo, I have a section devoted to “blogs, tweets, and pins.” This section allows me to link interesting and valuable resources specific to what I am seeing in classes or that are specific to school learning goals.
3. I share my reading life with staff. By writing reflections and reviews of books, I model for staff lifelong learning and the importance of reading, but also then have resources to share in conversations as they come up. I can’t think of how many times I have said, “In my office I have a book that you’d love” or “I read in a book about just that topic that you’d love.”
4. Obviously twitter serves as an immediate and powerful resource to share personalized learning with teachers. If I read an article or see a tweet that reminds me of a teacher, I can easily retweet it to them or message them about it.