I hope that everyone had a merry Christmas. We had a very relaxing Christmas at the Evans household. Katie and Chris were sadly not with us this year (they spent Christmas with Chris's family in Chicago). I enjoyed having some quiet time to relax after completing my first semester of teaching!

Dad got a new pair of snow shoes for Christmas, which conveniently means that the Evans house has three pairs.  We went for a Christmas Eve snowshoe and managed to stay warm in the cold (but sunny) weather.
We also enjoyed having some Christmas guests come and visit us in the yard.
Today Dad didn't have work, so after shoveling the driveway we all enjoyed some fun snow recreation.  We managed to dig up an old purple plastic sled from the garage and tested its strength against the rocky cliff in the backyard.  Here you can see our path. 
This picture is taken from about halfway down the slope and displays the rocky terrain.  Our goal was to launch off the rock, fly through the air, and go faster down the deathly slope.  As often as not, we would crash into the rock and tumble out of the sled.
This action shot, taken by Dad, shows me about to wipe-out after crashing into the rock.
Mom safely made it over the rock and is continuing down the hill.
In this picture, I made it all the way to the bottom of the hill, but ran flat over a small tree... hurting myself, and also the tree.
We were so inspired by our sledding fun that we decided to invest in a new sled.  This one is hopefully a bit sturdier than the purple plastic one, and can also fit two people.  Here, Mom and I test our new purchase in the living room.  I especially like how short Mom's snow pants are.

I hope that your Christmas was as enjoyable as ours, and less dangerous too!

It's snowing like cats and dogs today! I'm amazed that school wasn't canceled! I took a quick picture out of my office of the snow. It's a little fuzzy because of the screen.
While I had my camera out, I figured I would snap a few pictures of my office. I share it with our engineering teacher, who is the head of technology. It looks like a mess... but it's a pretty well organized mess! This first picture is my desk...
This is our lovely work bench will all of our servers and a few things we're fixing.
Well, that's the weather update from Greeley. Hope you enjoyed it!

I had a really eventful weekend! We had a big snow storm on Friday and Saturday. It was the first big snow of the year (in Loveland). We still only got a few inches, but the roads were a big mess! This is the lake behind my apartment... it still wasn't frozen on Thursday, but by Friday it was frozen and covered in snow.

I braved the weather and went down to Denver on Saturday afternoon. Fortunately, my car has all-wheel drive and snow tires. I safely made it to Denver and went to the Ornament exchange at St. Catherine's Church. I went with my good friends Alina and Missy (below).
Women from the church decorate the tables and each table is gorgeous and has a unique theme. I didn't get any pictures of the tables... but maybe someone will e-mail me their pictures. I sat with my good friends, the Neals, and had a wonderful evening! The tables, food and company were all outstanding and I'm already looking forward to next year!

Holy Cow!  It's already December!  It doesn't feel like it's nearly Christmas... I think partially due to our lack of snow.  I'm (as usual) very behind in blogging.  I only point this out because I have a fantastic Thanksgiving picture to share... but it's a bit late.  I decided it was worth posting anyway. 

Megabyte has been quite sick lately... she seems to have gotten phenomena.  She was on some medication for a while, but wasn't improving.  I was really concerned that she wouldn't live long after stopping the medicine, but that was a month ago.  She's still acting like her cheery self, though she wheezes pretty loudly.  I was very happy she spent Thanksgiving with me, and hopefully will be around for Christmas as well.  

Moving on to happier news, our very good friends recently joined the Orthodox Church through a sacrament known as Chrismation.  My parents sponsored Tracy and Rich, and other church friends sponsored their lovely daughters.   I was thrilled to witness their special time and thought I would share these pictures. 

As usual, I'm a bit behind in my blogging! I was uploading pictures from my camera and just had to post these! Two weekends ago, my family was invited to attend the Aurora symphony with our good friends from church. Rich, the dad of the adorable young ladies in the pictures, plays the trumpet in the symphony, so we went with his wife, Tracy, their two daughters, Emma and Rosie, and Alina (another good friend from church). We all had dinner first at one of our favorite places, BJ's. We know BJ's from California, but one was just built in Aurora so it was the perfect chance to check it out.

Rosie was thrilled to be dressed up and going out!

We posed for a quick picture before heading to the symphony.
From left to right: Rosie, Me, Emma, Alina and my mom.
We had a fantastic evening and I loved hearing Rich and the whole symphony. I'm really looking forward to going again soon!

My old roommate from Westmont flew all the way from Sacramento to visit me last weekend! We had a FANTASTIC time! Lots of (rather ridiculous) adventures.

Alison came to school with me on Thursday and visited some history classes (she was a history major). So that was pretty fun to show her what I've been doing.

On Friday, we drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park. Alison is a National Park lover and was SO excited to visit. It was super windy the whole day and I have about 15 pictures of me with my hair in my face. I thought I would just post one. This was when I pulled to the side of the road to remove a tumbleweed from where it had lodged under my car.
This is Alison... she's clearly enjoying her visit to the mountains!
A nice picture of an aspen tree with a few leaves left. Alison used to intern for Chris doing photography, and I thought he would be proud of this shot she took.
This is a picture of our lunchtime villan. We were enjoying sandwiches on a rock when this fellow decided to join us. He was very forward and was not deterred by any amount of shoo-ing and stomping. We finally relocated to finish our lunch.
Al and I at a small pond.
As we were leaving, we saw a whole group of deer that were right by the street. They eventually crossed in front of the car and Alison took this picture. Sadly, we saw no elk.
After safely returning from our mountain excursions, Alison and I, being the super-cool people that we are, attended a party. It was a potluck type gathering at the house of another young teacher from my school. We decided to make this festive seven-layer dip.

Finally, to conclude our time together, we visited the Budweiser Brewery in Fort Collins. We liked seeing how the beer was made, but loved seeing the pretty Clydesdale horses. We also enjoyed sampling some beer.

All in all, we had a really fun visit together!

I have so much to catch up on! Things have been so busy lately! I've been meaning to post these pictures of when my dear friend Alina came to visit in Loveland. My mom was here too and we had a lovely time together!

I remember that it always snowed before Halloween when I was growing up in Monument, and I was wondering if that would be true this year.  It was!  It snowed this morning!  Not in Loveland where I live, but in Monument where I was visiting my parents for the weekend.  I took this video of it snowing on our deck because the snowflakes didn't show up well in still-pictures.  

I'm so excited because my college roommate, Alison, is coming to visit me this weekend!  She lives in California and has never been to Colorado!  I can't wait to show her around and we're planning to do some fun hiking up in Estes Park.  I'm sure I'll be posting plenty of pictures from our fun weekend, so stay tuned!  

Differentiating Instruction

I'm hoping this blog can be a great mix of updates on my life and also reflections on teaching technology.  There are so many great blogs by other tech teachers that explore questions and conversations that are relevant to our field, and I would love to add my thoughts to dialogue.  So with that said, some posts may be on the techie side, and some on the personal side.  Enjoy :-)

One of my biggest struggles in teaching so far is figuring out how to meet students at every level.  On one side of things, I have students that struggle greatly with typing (which makes everything take SO long!) and on the other side I have students that already know how to do everything I'm teaching.  

The students that finish quickly are always becoming a distraction to those still working, despite the variety of "early finisher" activities that I provide.   The EF activities usually include working on the homework, playing a typing game, or working on a tutorial that teaches an advanced concept of what we're learning.  Students always opt for typing games and manage to be really distracting to others.  

While the EF kids have been finished for ages and are bored, the slower students struggle to finish assignments during class.  Because we use lots of specific software, not finishing work requires them to come in after school to finish.  The same students always get stuck with needing to come after school, and often decide not to.  Therefore, they easily get poor grades because they don't finish their work.  I hate the inequality of some students always getting more work outside of class because they work slowly.  It seems to set them up for failure.  

Anyway, that's a big challenge for me right now.  Probably pretty common for all teachers, with a unique twist since we do all our work on computers.  Feel free to contribute any thoughts on how you've managed this!

I haven't posted in a long time! I've been so so SO busy that I just haven't had a moment! I'm enjoying a four-day weekend, and thought I would update everyone. I'm about to start my fourth week of school, and so far I LOVE teaching! It has been a crazy amount of work so far, but it's definitely worth it! The picture above is of the school, Frontier Academy (You can click it to see a bigger version).

I'm teaching four classes - 2 sections of Multimedia (mostly computer graphics and animation), Critical Skills (A basic applications class for freshmen), and Programming. The students have been really great. All my classes have 28 students except programming which only has 8. I teach in the afternoons, so in the morning I have a planning period and a time for helping teachers with technology and generally fixing all the things that go wrong with computers.

I just gave the first test in Programming and was pleased to see that overall my students did pretty well. They seem to be struggling a bit with syntax (big surprise.) but are understanding the concepts. I'm teaching them Java because I would like to offer AP Computer Science next year (which is in Java).

I'm pretty exhausted from everything, but I really enjoy it. Planning for all the courses is really time consuming, especially as my first year teaching them all. I feel confident that things will slow down a bit in the future.

Big News... I passed the PLACE test! Yahoo! The PLACE test is the Program for Licensing Assessments for Colorado Educators. Whew, basically that long name just means that you have to pass the test before you can get a teaching credential. So a few weeks ago I took the Instructional Technology PLACE exam. I passed with a 96%. This says more about how challenging the test is than my actual skill level. The questions were very basic, but its still nice to know that I'm finished with it!

Now, I'm just waiting to hear if my transcript evaluation passed. I need 30 semester hours of college work in Computer Science, with at least 3 hours in a variety of specific areas such as programming, applications, and networks. If I pass the transcript review then I can enroll in online courses and get my teaching credential at the end of the school year.

I'll keep you updated!

I had a fantastic weekend with our good friend Peggy and Bre that were visiting from San Diego. Our moms have known each other since I was really young and we've stayed very close to them despite being a few states away!

Everyone drove up to Loveland on Thursday to visit my apartment and school. Bre is an elementary school teacher, so she assisted me in adding a lovely new bulletin board to my room. I had all the materials ready, but couldn't possibly hang it all straight without some assistance. She had some great suggestions! The bulletin board will highlight a different computing career each month.

On Friday, we drove around Denver doing a bit of this and that... Mom and Peggy are ready to go!

We got to stop and have lunch with our very good friend Alina. We went to Jason's deli and had big smiles after eating some soft-serve icecream!

Another cute pic of Mom and Peggy

We snapped this picture right before I had to head back to Loveland. What a fun weekend... it was wonderful to be with such good friends!

I had quite the surprise for my mom this weekend... I came home to visit! I decided to take Friday off and drive down Thursday night. We have family friends visiting next week and then she'll be in California at a friend's wedding so I was helping her get the house collected before all the craziness begins! Piggie posed for a quick picture:Of course... Mom and I couldn't just clean the house and do chores... we took a quick break to do a little shopping and tried on these Fantastic hats!We also found time to squeeze in a quick nail session...I babysat on Saturday afternoon though, so before we knew it, it was time for piggie and I to head back up to Loveland. Megabyte was all packed up in the car:And we grabbed a quick pic before I headed out.What a fun weekend!

This week my mom and I painted the computer lab at my school. You can see from the before picture that it was all very white.

We decided to go with a nice blue color that matches some cabinets in the back of the room. It was so nice of her to come and help me paint... it was a huge job! Just moving the computers away from the walls was a giant task, and you wouldn't believe the gross things we found behind the desks!


This is a bulletin board display that I made, and my mom helped me hang everything so it was straight!

I'm glad to say that we're all finished now, and I have a beautiful blue classroom!

Happy 4th Of July!

Thanks so much for everyone's comments! To clarify a bit, I'm starting work today because I have a summer contract to do Tech work at the school. We're getting all new computers for my lab, doing maintenance on teacher computers, doing some website work etc. So I'm starting this week working with the other Tech people. Teachers start on August 1 and students start August 14. We do have a unique schedule though. The school uses a modified block system. Mondays and Wednesdays are Red days, and Tuesdays and Thursdays are Blue days. Students take four classes on a Red day and four different classes on a Blue day. So what about Fridays? We don't have school! It's a four-day week, which is very exciting to me!

As promised, here are the pictures of my bedroom. It looks a bit plain without anything on the walls yet, but I'm getting there.