After coming back from NCCAT one can only feel like your brain is going to explode with all of these amazing ideas that you just heard from all these amazing people. So how do you pick and choose what you will try to use in your classroom? Some of the most memorable things came from Eric Rowles. Although simple, I feel that we must remember that education is supposed to be fun. How many times do we as teachers go to PD and although the information is good, we loose half of it simple because we are too bored? We must not have our students feel this way about our classrooms! I’ve already decided that my kids will walk into class and work on their warm up as the beats of djearworm or another fun mashup play in the background. I want them to get hyped about science and what we will be doing for the day.
As a new teacher, I haven’t had a lot of PD opportunities quite yet but from what I have gone to NCCAT knocks them all out of the park. NCCAT brought new ways to talk about PD and constantly had us up moving, thinking outside the box, and getting out of our comfort zones. My least favorite session was the Why Culture Matters. I really enjoyed the first part when we acted out the two different countries and I will probably use that as a team building activity in my classroom to teach about differences and not making assumptions. However, I feel the rest of the presentation could have been reduced down to an hour instead of two. I also thought it would be more of an incorporating different cultures into the classroom or how different cultures affect the behaviors of students in the classroom. Overall the most useful session was the edcamp. I loved being able to sit with other teachers and talk about what we thought was important and how could we fix some of the issues that we were struggling with. It was nice to talk to individuals who deal with the same struggles and work on a solution together. As they say two is better than one, so I know with our over forty Kenan brains we were good to go!