The first day of the rest of my life...

...Or at least my teacher life.

This is my first ever blog post.  I've been lurking in the MTBoS for the past year and I've been thinking about blogging for a while.  At our in-service before the start of school, we were told that we were going to have to come up with a plan for differentiated teacher evaluation.  With several options, I thought that using the MTBoS as Professional Development would be an amazing opportunity for my professional growth.  And the push I needed to become more involved and start blogging.

This is my 14th year, and I was really having a hard time getting excited about it.  This has never happened before.  I'm also teaching a course I've never taught before and that hasn't happened for quite a few years.  These are the reasons why I'm really trying to make more of an effort to change some things and take the idea of "growing professionally" a lot more seriously. So, I'm hoping that this blog will be a way to help me set goals and reflect on my practices in my attempt to get better at what I do.

Some things I've already initiated in my classroom (all begged, borrowed, and stolen from the amazing Math teachers I follow on Twitter):

• Whiteboarding (you can read about it here, and get some ideas for incorporating it here, and here, and here).  I went to Home Depot and had 2 large sheets of tile board cut into 6 pieces each so I have 12 awesome whiteboards for group work.  
• New Bellringer sheets that focus on a different type of bellringer for each day of the week (from @algebrainiac1 at http://algebrainiac.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/made4math-weekly-warm-up-sheet/)  Here are Mine for  Honors Geometry and Precalculus.  My bellringers include estimation180.com, visualpatterns.org, and dailydesmos.com.  
• Using Math Munch in the classroom.  I'm going to have my Honors Geometry students turn in 3 Math Munch activities for the first marking period.  I got the idea from @fawnpnguyen from her blog post. I adjusted her handout to allow for students to choose 3 of 5 activities (Here's mine). We'll see how it goes.
• Using Desmos as a graphing and investigation tool.  I'm working on a transformations investigation for my Precalculus class to use in about a week.

Some things are still on my to-do list.  I guess a little bit at a time....