Critical+Incident

//[Describe, in narrative form, a critical incident that you experienced while teaching or working in a school. The event may involve students, colleagues/ other members of your school educational community, or it may involve curriculum or something else connected to your practice. It should be an incident that made you pause, interrupted your flow, caused you to withdraw, made you question yourself. One in which a solution was not immediately obvious. (if you ever even found one.) It needs to be in a shareable form – paper is preferred – as someone will be reading and commenting on it. - oh yes, don't put your name on it, please!]// ..... The particular 'Critical Incident' I will relay is what happened sometime in February of this past school year. It was a moment I was all too familiar with as it has happened repeatedly throughout my 20 year teaching career. To be brief the problem was finding a way to bring the ideas in my head onto paper. This included plans I have for my individual student's programs and the keeping of Assessment and Evaluation records. In my time as a teacher I have tried many systems and approaches from files to binders but none of them ever really enabled me to be able to see clearly where I wanted to go and how my students were doing. The problem has always been that I think in multiple layers but putting these ideas into some kind of paper format has always proved to be woefully inadequate. How, for instance, do you 'layer' plans unless you use some kind of transparent paper? The same goes for my Assessments and Evaluation of student work. I have always found it hard to assess student work and even more so to find a way to store samples and track progress because I have always wanted to be able to sort and group students in different ways so that the Assessments I make can guide my Instruction. Back in September of 2010 I tried to put my Assessment data onto Excel. I thought at the time that it would be a good route to go because I could sort my information in all sorts of ways: by age, gender, need, subject, designation etc. However, after many hours of cutting and pasting to produce the kind of document I was envisioning I ended up with a 99,000 page document that I could neither save nor print. Cut to February. The second term is coming to a close and I find myself in the same predicament again when a colleague asks me off-handedly if I had ever heard of wikispaces. Not being into websites or much else beyond the basics of word processing and using my cell phone I said, "no" without much interest in finding out more. Somehow, however, I did get into a discussion of what wikipages are and something suddenly something inside me clicked. In an instant I could picture in my mind how using such a tool could enable me to do the layering of Planning and Assessment data that I had struggled to do earlier on Excel. This, combined with being introduced at the same time to Evernote by another tech savvy friend with it's ability to store photos, record conversations and tag so as to be sortable in a variety of ways, broke this long standing log jam and sold me on the potential of certain technological tools to make what I envision a reality. I was able to layer my plans and goals for Instruction and Assessment records onto my wikisite and create virtual portfolios of student work and progress using photos, video and audio clips on Evernote. Since then I have been introduced to Reading, Writing, Spelling, Dictation and Vocabulary sites that have opened up a world of possibilities. In many ways it has been like being launched from a slingshot that had twenty years of pull in it; when the tension released it had a rather explosive result.