Meetings for October 18th and 25th

We meet on October 18th after school and on the 25th during lunch. We finished covering individual students in the Academy and the interventions necessary for them. Academy teachers were asked to blog more. Assignments for the upcoming university field trips were determined. I think that was about it, let me know if I missed anything.

Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is the current buzz word at the DO. Of course, we all new it works with our very visual learners in the Academy. There is a free download for a mind mapping program you need to check out.


http://www.xmind.net/

MyAccess

I just finished grading a couple of writing assignments in my Junior class. I noticed that when the students used MyAccess, their grades on their essays tend to be better--at least by half a grade, if not more. It cleans up their writing and helps point out different things that each student needs to focus on.

For example, Bryan was working on an essay and his MyAccess account came back stating that he needed to use more transitional words. He clicked on one of the reference tabs and a list of transitional words appeared. I heard him then exclaim "Oh, these. I know what these are." After reading his paper, it was much better than his other essays have been.

Meeting Oct. 18th 2010

We have had 2 previous meetings, Oct. 4th and 11th, in which field trips and fund raising was discussed. At this meeting we talked about individual students and problems we were seeing in each classroom. Options to help students do better were discussed. Decisions on who would be going as chaperones to USC and UCLA were discussed. Criteria for students to go are as follows:


2.16 or better GPA

No F's at all

No N's or U's on citizenship

Permission slips will be handed out to qualifying students and those that return them first on given date will have first choice of which university the will go to.

Living Textbooks

Digital textbooks are finally evolving away from stale, outdated 2-D textbooks. Wired published an article a few hours ago about E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth Biology e-book.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/wilson-free-biology-textbook