Summer PD Plans

Following up +Jennifer Peyrot's helpful post on her plans for "Summer Learning Fun" and thanks to the inspiration found in the scores of Twitter chats happening every day, I figured it'd be a good idea for me to consolidate some of my own plans for next year. I highly doubt that I'll get through everything, but I'm eager to get started, and I'm looking forward to talking with others about their own projects. It should be a fun and hopefully productive summer!

Reading I've been reading a fair number of books relating to education and pedagogy lately, largely inspired by the #CAedchat book club, and I've keeping my notes in an Evernote notebook. I'll continue to add to it and welcome any comments and questions. A few books on my reading list:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman on the various processes involved in thinking
• Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal on the growing importance of games
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck on mindset attitudes and success
• Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison on teaching and thinking
• Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom by Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager on the "maker" movement

Thinking Next year I'll be teaching Latin IA to new 7th graders, which I've never done before. Our incoming class will be huge, and so I'm doubly excited to take on this task. Given that we shouldn't move too quickly with grammar in a class like this, there will be ample opportunity to explore the new ideas I've been absorbing from my PLN to build a strong community of invested learners right from the start. We'll all have laptops too, which will enable us to do things in class that we haven't yet been able to do. In particular, I'm interested in picking up a few ideas I've been thinking through over the past year, including:

• learning more trcks with our LMS Canvas
• developing mapping projects
• developing activites using Google Forms and search skills
• rethinking grading using standards-based grading (thanks #sbgchat!) and "crowdsourcing" grading
• exploring digital storytelling (e.g. student videos, comic books, choose-your-own adventures, etc.)
• playing around with TodayMeet for classroom management
• working on a collaborative Latin penpal program
• continuing to think through blog uses
• considering how to implement "20% time" and #geniushour
• thinking through "augmented reality" as a tool for education (thanks #patue!)

I've also been approached to teach an independent study in linguistics for a handful of upperclassmen next year, and I'm excited to start planning. Tentatively, the class will cover basic linguistic science in the first semester, then open to inquiry-based projects in the second semester. Because students will be on the other campus, I'm exploring ways to construct a partially online course, for which I could use #flipclass methods to provide content to students. Doing so would give students more flexibility to work the course into their schedules. It's very possible that a Google+ community, combined with Google Hangouts, could provide everything we need for the course.

Visiting I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to take part in summer conferences:

• I'll attend InstructureCon to learn more about the Canvas LMS.
• I'm excited for my first ISTE conference for everything on technology in education.
• There are a number of edcamp opportunities later this summer, including #edcampsfbay on Aug. 10.
• I'll be co-organizing the free PlaydateLA "unconference" on Aug. 17 to give other educators in the LA area a change to explore ways to use technology in education. All are welcome to sign up!

Exploring I'm very excited to join the computer science club next year, when we'll be shifting our focus to coding and working on Raspberry Pi projects. We'll also tackle some Codecademy.com After-School Programming challenges.

Writing Finally, I'm very eager to continue some of my own work in Greek and Latin linguistics. I've got a book review to work on, in addition to a few papers I've been meaning to write up. By putting writing together with some of the other activities above together, I may hopefully come up with something to submit for CA2014.