Week 3 Communities/Final Project

After the class with Dr. Schwier I felt inspired and wanted to rush into my class to simply talk about communities.  The discussion we had about how people feel connected and a part of something really resonated with me from my own schools perspective.  We need to have that relationship with so many of our families otherwise we are not respected and then that negatively effects how we can run our classroom.  It also made me think of how the sense of community will help me be successful in this class and throughout my entire masters program.  If I can develop an online community with a variety of professionals that can help me become a better educator, learner, writer, etc, why wouldn't I?  I am beginning to view this class as another branch in my network of professional colleagues, that I can work with to create a more positive atmosphere for my system, school, and class.  With all that I am excited to talk about my final project.
After an email with Alec, I have decided to work towards creating a blended classroom.  My reasoning is because I have a group of students this year that need to work in small groups, and mostly at their own pace.  Either it is due to attendance, behavior, or their specific learning styles.  In our school we already break our students up into reading groups, math groups, writing groups, Inquiry groups for our social and science outcomes, and practical and applied arts groupings as well.   With the variety of students that roll through the classroom every day combined with the 60% attendance I get each day, I am finding it very difficult to keep each student engaged.  Either they are finishing the assignments and I need to find filler assignments for those students that attend regularly, or I am attempting to catch up and push those poor attenders through the assignment that they are unable to meet any outcome.  I am hoping that with a blended classroom it will help scaffold the learning in my classroom for the variety of classes I am in charge of teaching. 
All of our students have access to laptops in our school and each one of them have their own specific ID and passwords.  We have the tools within our school that a blended classroom seems like it might help with the success of our students.  With my research so far into blended classrooms I have found some sites that are helping me begin to create meaningful tasks that will help my students learn and meet objectives while staying within their learning parameters.  Some very helpful sites I have found would be:

https://www.edmodo.com/
This is most likely going to be my learning hub.  Within this site I have been able to upload my assignments, and bring in Youtube videos for my math instruction.  I am planning on reconfiguring my math class to include this new learning tool into my Explore +4 model I have started this year with.   This website I believe will help me create a more postive learning atmosphere as the students will have more of an opportunity to work one on one with me during our math times because we will have a strong understanding of what we are supposed to be doing each class, based on where each student is at. 

http://learni.st/category/featured
The Learnist website is another site where I have began to dive into and it is helping me find new ways to demonstrate how to do a variety of rational number problems.  I am starting off with a unit on integers and through the learnist website I have created a board that deals with this skill directly.  I get daily emails that may have useful information, videos, and problems for the students to solve. 

https://www.khanacademy.org/
Khan Acadamy is another website that I have began to play around in and its is useful for the practice of skills.  I say that because I began looking into this after I had already found the videos and "teaching tools" that I needed for the first unit.  Now that I have began to navigate through the website I have found that their teaching videos are the same or very similar to the videos  I have found... I will definately be utilizing this website in the future.  I am not sure how it will link into the Edmodo site and therefore may simply use it as a source of information, but nonetheless I will be on here quite frequently.

So far these are the sites that I have found and had some form of success with.  As you can see I am putting most of my focus on the math curriculum, that is mostly because I have an intern this semester and she is doing most of our Language Arts and I do not want to put the task of making sure the assignments are online ready.    I am not ready to share my progress with the sites yet with the public, I am hoping next week I will have most of my students registered into my classes and I can start with a "soft opening" of the concept with them.  I am both excited and nervous to do this with my students.   Right now I have high expectations for this concept, but I am also slightly jaded and truly very worried that this will flop and will be more of a stress than a help.  That is where my "online community" comes in... I am hoping that I can bounce my ideas off my community members and share my trials and tribulations along with my successes and hopefully I can not only develop a stronger understanding for online resources but my students can improve their understanding of any content area that I teach them throughout the year. 
My request to my community members would be that if you know of or have any sites/videos that are good for demonstrations of skills, techniques, tasks, or development of any of those topics please don't be afraid to tag me, tweet me, share with me, post on my wall, or send to me any other way possible.  Thanks for the help and I look forward to hearing, reading, contacting any and all of you!