Maintain Focus With This

Sticky notes. Congrats. Done. *mic drop*

Just kidding. You're probably wondering how sticky notes, a teacher's best friend, can help you focus.

I recently started my Masters studies and found when I was doing my mountain of reading for the week that I would lose focus easily. That's really an understatement. I was like the dog from the movie Up. Squirrel! I found my mind drifting from blog ideas to lesson plan ideas to "Do I have something to take for lunch tomorrow?" A colleague of mine was talking about how she uses sticky notes for all of her reminders. Her office is practically wallpapered in them. One week while reading my mountain I was interrupted by yet another thought when, it hit me to put it on a sticky note and just set it aside. 

By the time I was done I had ten or so sticky notes. At that time I could decide what to do with each of them. Some transferred to my bullet journal. Some I took care of right then and some I put in an Evernote and expanded upon. You can even get super fancy with your Post-It notes now by putting them into your Evernote account and tying the color of four basic Post-It colors to specific notebooks. The sticky note allowed me to put it out of my mind and focus on my reading. This is also an approach you could use with your highly distracted students. Give it a try and leave your results in the comments.

The Power of Movies

I had to add Matt Damon for Google to find it.

I've never been a big movie person. I saw Jaws for the first time two years ago. I don't think I've ever seen National Lampoon's anything and I hated Citizen Kane. That war movie with Nathan Fillion is what I call (...goes to Google it...) Saving Private Ryan. It's not because I think it's a terrible movie. It actually tells a wonderful, albeit tragic story. It just illustrates how much of a movie person I am not. Yet, what I love most about my job is making movies. We're not talking blockbuster Hollywood anything. I make morning announcements. I make movies about having an incredible bagel dog for lunch. At least that was my gateway drug.

Our story begins when our school started universal breakfast a couple years ago. Universal breakfast means every kid in the whole school (we have almost 900) gets breakfast or at least the option of having breakfast at school. That also meant we had to make the most of our time in the morning. The librarian, ECS, and I set out to change the format of morning ceremony in order to save some time. Little did I know what it would become.

courtesy of CCSD Food Services

It started out basic. We mentioned the color day (we run on a six day schedule red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple), the date, said the pledge, and had the moment of silence. Soon, a student suggested we add the weather, so we did. Then the PE teacher asked if I'd create an advertisement for rec center. Pretty soon morning announcements were nearly 10 minutes long and included nuggets of information from random facts about fruit to events coming up on the school calendar. This got me to thinking, "It's like the morning news." LIGHT BULB! What if the kids became reporters and created their own news segments? So I set out to create a curriculum around that idea for 4th grade.

In the meantime, word had gotten out about these commercials and I started making them for all kinds of things. We made one for smencils, Harvest Festival, Showcase Night, Reading Week, secret valentines, running club, and the Black & White Dance. It didn't stop there though. We made Good Idea/Bad Idea a regular segment to reinforce good behavior and procedures throughout the school. The crowning achievement of movie glory was the CRT pep rally. Third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers all made videos to get the kids pumped up for the CRT pep rally. By the end of the 2012-13 school year all I wanted to do full time was make movies.

This is really what happens when I get an idea.

Over the summer I went to the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute which you read a little about in my post, Passport to AWESOME. We were asked on the second day to write down what we were passionate about. I wrote down and erased a few things before I remembered what I said over and over at the close of the school year, "I wish I could just make movies." So I found myself in a group with other people who liked to make movies. Some of them had made real big screen movies and that was a little intimidating, but it was also an opportunity I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere else. Some of our group liked the storytelling aspect of movies and some like the production aspect. Another ADE, Mr. Don Goble, has a hashtag #powerofvideo on Twitter that leads to wonderful stories and resources on the topic. I learned a ton while I was there, but one project in particular stuck out to me. It was Mr. Josh Mika and his video about ChooseKind. You might want tissues for that one. It moved me.

So here I am now, getting ready to go back to school and I'm thinking about how my students can use video to give voice to their stories, their learning, and their ideas. I will probably still call it "the war movie with Nathan Fillion," but this experience has made me realize just what a powerful medium movies and video can be. It can give voice to kids who don't have it and inspire kids who just needed an outlet. Most of all, it gives kids power and invests them in their own learning in a way few other forms of media can.