One Year Down

Last year revolutionized my teaching when I received a Chromebook cart stocked with 36 shiny new machines ready for students to use.  While I've always been a lover of technology, I'd never really learned how to teach with it in this 1:1 manner.  I was thrilled to jump in and try everything.  It was an exciting year full of successes, failures, and learning experiences.  I hung this poster up in my classroom and it became an often-referred to acronym in my class of sixth graders:

Photo from www.edgalaxy.com

I've never been someone who is comfortable failing, especially in front of others, adults or students.  I decided to embrace this idea not only to push myself out of my comfort zone as I learned to teach in a whole new way, but also to model for my students that it's okay to fail. Both my students and I found that some of our greatest learning experiences were born out of failures.  Countless times in my classroom, I'd think I had a great tech-based plan/lesson/activity, and we would get all excited, only to have it not work.  But we would all roll with it, often to my class jubilantly shouting, "Fail!" (and I'd join in, of course). Then back to the proverbial drawing board I'd go, figuring out a new solution to the problem. It changed my attitude toward trying new things and I learned more than I ever expected to in one short school year.

So now that my first year of teaching with Chromebooks is behind me, I'm really looking forward to starting off the next school year with a more clear plan in terms of technology integration.