Shawn Moore's Blog (9)

I have started an experiment in collaborative writing and I am would like to invite anyone who is interested in participating to please email me. The first project is to collaboratively write a Physical Science textbook utilizing Google Docs as the medium. This textbook will be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and is intended as an alternative to purchasing textbooks. I am focusing on the NC Standard Course of Study since that is where I teach, but hope that this can be… Continue

I have been away from this group for a long time. I made a big change going into this school year. I moved from the middle school I had been teaching at to a new high school. The school that I am at is an Early college High School which is part of the New Schools Project that is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is a very exciting, innovative and decidedly "outside the box" program and I am honored to be a part of it.



We are very much under a microscope and we are… Continue

" O frabjous day,
Calloo! Callay!"

An end to another year, but a beginning to a new job at a new school with a completely different mindset. I'm going to have a short summer, but I am really excited about the new possibilities!

Finished End-of-Grade testing today and then broke up a fight in the cafeteria an hour later. 6 days to go... Hope you all are making it through this stressful time!

The RAM fairy paid my classroom a visit and left me 10 128mb RAM chips for my Mac resurrection project! Actually, it was our technology specialist who left them for me, she just neglected to tell me she had left them in my box a week ago. I found them Friday and was positively giddy! I have been sticking the two chips that I had into a computer, firing it up, updating the firmware and the OS, shutting it down, removing the RAM and repeating the process with the next computer. Whew! Now they are… Continue

Like many of you, I am busy getting everything together for the end of the year and the inevitable drudgery of testing. In NC, we now have a Science end-of-grade test for 5th and 8th grades. I have inevitably changed some of the approaches I have used in an effort to cover the broad, shallow curriculum that we have and to try and prepare my students for the test. It is a little soul crushing, this testing protocol that seems so de rigeur these days...



Usually at this time of year I… Continue

I watched the TED talk that was posted yesterday. The one of Sir Ken Robinson, who asks the question: does education kill children's creativity? This really struck home with me...



I have been one severely angst ridden teacher this year. Nothing seems to go right and I find myself trying to instill creativity, collaborative skills and interdisciplinary thinking into students who not only aren't receptive, but whose parents aren't receptive either. I think I'm beginning to get ground up… Continue

I would like suggestions on a short, but sweet, proper use agreement for using with my students on their cell project. These students are pretty "spirited" or as a good friend likes to say, "all horsepower, no steering wheel". I really want to set them up for success and I know that they can easily outsmart the school's attempts to keep them in line on the internet. I've done basic research with them on the internet, but now I really want to shift classroom content more and more onto the… Continue

I am deep in the planning stages of a project for my students to complete here at the end of the year. The premise is that they must devise some dramatic rendering of the functions of a cell. They have to include all of the different organelles and their functions within the dramatic framework. Their final product can be a play, puppet show, cartoon or comic strip/comic book. The play, puppet show and cartoon will be podcasted, while the comic will be viewable online. I found a very cool… Continue