the network for middle school math and science teachers

Dr. GBJohnson Female Peachtree City, GA United States: Share on Facebook Share Twitter

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Literacy in the Content …

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Literacy in the Content Areas

Do your students struggle with comprehension or vocabulary development? Looking for ways to integrate literacy in your instruction? This group will explore issues related to literacy in middle school science and mathematics.

Dr. GBJohnson joined Jessica Fries-Gaither's group Nov 10, 2010

5 Comments

Dr. GBJohnson commented on Dr. GBJohnson's blog post '21st Century Skills, Are We There Yet?'

We as educators probably do need to redefine our purpose, redesign our curriculum to fit the 21st century needs and rework how we as educators work together. Teachers are still isolated in their classrooms and need interaction with others during…

Oct 31, 2010

Davilla Riddle commented on Dr. GBJohnson's blog post '21st Century Skills, Are We There Yet?'

Thank you. I really enjoyed your webinar. As I watched it, my mind kept wondering back to the key phrase "education reform". These buzz words are all over the news media. However, I am wondering if it is reform we need or something else.…

Oct 31, 2010

Dr. GBJohnson commented on Sarah Marie Klingler's blog post '21st Century Webinar'

All webinars are archived.

Oct 25, 2010

21st Century Skills, Are We There Yet?

Thanks to all who attended my webinar on 21st Century Skills, Are We There Yet? We had a great discussion on whether we as educators are providing the skills our students will need in order to be productive citizens when they leave the K-12 setting. A couple of days after this webinar, I received the November 2010 issue of Ed Digest. And low and behold, there's an article, "A Century of Skills Movements" by Diane Ravitch, from American Educator. She mentions the fact that educators have been…See More

Blog post by Dr. GBJohnson Oct 25, 2010

2 Comments

Tom Jenkins commented on Dr. GBJohnson's blog post 'Critical Thinking Skills'

I agree that engaging the student should be a top priority. The modern student is used to being entertained and having choices. While, I'm not suggesting that we dress up and dance around for your classes (that's entirely up to you), it is…

Sep 9, 2010

Christi Whitworth commented on Dr. GBJohnson's blog post 'Critical Thinking Skills'

I think the major result of utilizing the four Cs in any curriculum is student engagement. Even informal science/STEM environments can incorporate and gather data on the effectiveness of activities by examining these components.

Sep 7, 2010

Mary Henton commented on Dr. GBJohnson's blog post 'Critical Thinking Skills'

Thanks, Mary, for explaining how the four Cs look in your classroom. It certainly makes sense that students know these as explicit learning objectives. Just occurs to me that each of these Cs could be a theme that a team or even the whole school…

Aug 18, 2010

Dr. GBJohnson commented on Dr. GBJohnson's blog post 'Critical Thinking Skills'

I DO believe creativity is the one "C" that suffers due to high stakes testing.I do not have an answer to solve that problem right now. However, we as educators need to try to figure out a way to allow students to be creative. Because…

Aug 17, 2010

Mary LeFever commented on Dr. GBJohnson's blog post 'Critical Thinking Skills'

The four Cs are * critical thinking and problem solving, * communication, * collaboration, * and creativity and innovation. For at least half of my units, I have students produce artifacts of evidence of learning/knowledge gained with very specific…

Aug 17, 2010

Mary Henton commented on Dr. GBJohnson's blog post 'Critical Thinking Skills'

It IS amazing to think about the fact that our students today will have (and create) jobs that don't exist and aren't even envisioned today. (Hmmmm....perhaps an interesting professional development activity would be to have teachers…

Aug 17, 2010

Critical Thinking Skills

Today I just picked up my issue of EdDigest from the post office and quickly noticed an article on Critical Thinking Skills for the new workforce we are currently teaching. It is amazing, we are preparing students for jobs that have not even been invented yet. I thought about this upcoming school year. I immediately started thinking as I was reading the article, am I able to incorporate "(the four Cs)" they refer to, into my curriculum? I'm sure it's going to be pretty easy to incorporate the…See More

Blog post by Dr. GBJohnson Aug 15, 2010

6 Comments

Dr. GBJohnson is now a member of Middle School Portal Jun 4, 2010

Welcome Them!

Profile Information

Which best describes your position?: Classroom Teacher (preK-12), Researcher, Agency/Association Professional, Curriculum Coordinator

What discipline(s) do you teach?: Science, Mathematics, Social Studies, English/Language Arts, Enrichment

I need help with: ESL/ELL, Managing labs (including safety)

I can help with: Assessment/Testing, Classroom management, Content knowledge, Gifted and talented, Instructional strategies, Literacy, Being a new teacher, Involving parents/caregivers, Special needs students, Standards

Dr. GBJohnson's Blog

21st Century Skills, Are We There Yet?

Posted on October 25, 2010 at 7:04pm — 2 Comments

Critical Thinking Skills

Posted on August 15, 2010 at 7:43pm — 6 Comments

Comment Wall (5 comments)

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At 11:05am on April 11, 2011, Todd D. Paige said…: Genola,

Thanks so much for the welcome. I hope I am able to gain some insight from this network and maybe even offer a little along the way, too.

Todd

At 12:16pm on March 13, 2011, Ivo Herzog said…: Dear Genola,

Thank you for your welcome. I'm just getting oriented around this intersting site.

Ivo

At 8:19pm on March 12, 2011, Alaina Hermon said…: Thank you. I'm just trying to learn what all is in here. What a wide variety of stuff. It's almost overwhelming.

At 10:49pm on January 11, 2011, Kim Lightle said…: Hope you join us online this Thursday, 1/13 at 4pm EST as we explore how reader's theater can be used to improve comprehension of informational text and help students learn science concepts. We'll focus on science-themed text, but the same principles can apply to other content areas as well. You can find the link to participate, the descriptions, and archived recordings of all the webinars at http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/BeyondPenguins/Seminars

At 9:40am on June 4, 2010, Kim Lightle said…: Welcome aboard! We are using this NING network as a place where educators can connect with each other (through answers to profile questions and the advanced Members search) and also as a way to connect educators with exemplary resources and professional development opportunities.

If you look on the Main page - you'll see MSP2 resources in the upper left hand box - we have resource guides where we have sifted and sorted and contextualized resources on topics important to middle school math and science teachers, an archive of all of our past webinars, the ability to search the MSP2 collection, and pages of teacher and student opportunities and grants. Our newest resource guide is about Teaching With Tradebooks and includes lessons for science AND math classes..

We have have on the right side of the page our two project blogs - Resources for Math and Science and Connecting News. We also RSS feed the Free Technology for Teachers, Teach Engineering, and Science and Technology NYT blog feeds.

You can see a list of all the MSP2 events and others that we think would be of interest to our audience under the Events tab. We have groups - including a book club - and lots of conversations! We just had a free webinar on using Prezi as a presentation tool. One of our most popular webinars was Reading Mathematics is Different - you can find the all the recordings here - http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/MiddleSchoolPortal/Webinar_Archive.

Please don't hesitate to post a question or comment. We are always looking for feedback and new ideas for PD opportunities and people who would like to present. You wear lots of hats so I'm sure you have lots of ideas. So glad you joined - Kim