Post-Google Teacher Academy Chicago 2013 Application...

Wow, I just posted my Google Teacher Academy (GTA) video to YouTube and sent in my application!  Now it's time to get to blogging for real.  School's over and the app has been sent.
Now, what?
Well, first off I'm going to go through the end of the year and review the good and the bad.  Like this blog, the GTA process got me to take a hard look at what is good in my classroom and what needs improvement.  So, over the next few weeks, I'm going to highlight what practices that worked and why and how and why the clunkers clunked.
As I am a AP US History (APUSH), AP Econ/AP Gov (APEG), Econ/Gov (EG), and psychology teacher, I've got a lot of material to review...
Starting with my senior AP Econ/Gov (APEG) students, their final projects were awesome.  After two years of intense AP work from APUSH forward, they had learned a ton of concepts and all sorts of heavy duty study skills and their final projects were absolutely excellent.  They were all completely different.  As a teacher and mentor, I wanted to give them all a big class hug and I'm not a big hugger.  I even got a little teary eyed as one by one they went up and presented their unique view on what they had learned.  It was the ideal capstone to their project based career.  They needed minimal direction and they all delivered in spades!  They had come so far from those literally wide eyed juniors who started APUSH with the question, "This guy really wants us to read all of this and then write about it?  What is he thinking?"
Like I said, they were wide eyed!  Now, they're gone.  All trained up and turned loose on the world!  The cycle starts anew.  Here we go again.

Getting Started--Why Blog?

Why start a blog?
I would like to write a blog because it will force me to write down my ideas and help me crystallize my theories into words.  By doing this on a blog, I hope to share ideas with people.  I hope to post my ideas, pass on the ideas of others and also gather ideas through this blog.
My experiences through presenting across the county in the last year and becoming more active on Twitter have greatly advanced my ability to gather and disseminate ideas and I see this blog as another step on this journey.
Through all of this, I hope to help my students learn better.  By understanding how I teach well and not-so-well, my students will benefit.  By seeing what others do well, I can adapt my current practices and get better.
In the end, that's what I hope to do overall, get better.
That's why I teach, because it's a constant learning process and I'm constantly working to get better.
Here goes!