Reflections on the School Year

During the course of the craziness that is a state testing week, I’ve had time to reflect on some things that I’d like to research more about this summer.

• I’ve run across the idea of gamification in the classroom.  It’s an intriguing idea to me, but I need to see some examples to help me wrap my head around it.  I understand the concepts but for some reason I’m having trouble wrapping my content around it.  If anyone has any good websites for resources that show real world games used in a classroom I’d love to hear from you.
• I’m interested in better ways to motivate students when it comes to classroom management.  I feel like I have a good relationship with my kids, but I want to break the cycle of having external motivations to act better.  I really want kids to internalize the reasons we need to act civilly in class.  I want to experiment with things like Classroom Dojo and similar products to better understand how I can use them in the classroom to my advantage.
• I’m always on the lookout for how to streamline my classroom so that kids only have to go to a single location to understand and access everything for class.  I’m not super good at it currently.  I’ve tried Edmodo before, experimented with Google Drive, and housing everything in my classroom website and all of them have their flaws.  I’d really like to simplify as best I can.  I need to be intentional and really think through and commit to one thing for a school year.  We’ll see if I can make this happen.