2nd Week of January

DOK - Are your Questioning Strategies Effective?
TEA has created a website called the Revised Math TEKS for Grade K-8.  This is a resource that you and parents can use to help students reach high levels of rigor.  If you scroll down to the "Such As" link, it will give you a better picture of how the TEKS should be taught and will be assessed.

Special Note - There are also links of interest for HIGH SCHOOL.

Questioning Strategies
High level questions are critical to ensure that rigor is in your instruction, but the determination of whether or not students are reaching DOK 3 does not lie solely in the questions you ask.  It also depends on the answers to these 2 questions:

• What percentage of students are successfully answering these questions?
• What percentage of students are asking DOK 3 questions?

In order to reach DOK 3 in our instruction, it depends on what the students do with the rigorous questions that you ask.  Drop a comment below if you have a successful strategy that is getting all or most of your kids to successfully answer or ask DOK 3 questions.


Collaboration
Collaboration is not just what happens during your collaboration time but also what happens outside of it.  Collaboration is about personalizing your own learning to be better at something you are passionate about or improve on a personal area of difficulty.  Personalized learning is concept in which educators use technology resources and colleagues to work on an area of that would like to improve on.  When we select an area for growth and develop a plan to ensure growth occurs, students always win.  Below is a infographic that I found on Twitter that shows the results of educators engaged in personalized learning.  When we all are learning, we all are improving the learning for our students.



College & Career Readiness
We are excited to report that we have purchased a new software program called Career Cruising.  This software will help our students not only select a college and career pathway, but it will help parents, teachers and students define what students must do in school now to be prepared to enter their college and career pathway of choice.  Students will be able to register themselves for classes online and develop their own Personal Graduation Plan (PGP) online.



TIP (Tech Integration Pic) of the Week

by Cindy Haston

Students in Kevin Grace's English II honors class are competing in CSPAN's student documentary project StudentCam.  StudentCam is C-SPAN's annual national video documentary competition that encourages students to think critically about issues that affect our communities and our nation.  The theme this year is "The Three Branches of Government and You" and students must combine CSPAN footage of national leaders discussing current events with local video describing the impact of these global issues on our community. 
Students participating in the competition must complete regular class work on their own time so that they can use class time to collaborate with peers on creating their videos.  Students also meet and work outside of class time to get interviews and other footage required for their videos.

The documentaries are due January 20th.