For My Colleagues

These are an assortment of things that I have found, developed and/or used, that other teachers may find useful.

Materials I Have Created

• Developing Inquiry-Based Experiments in High School Chemistry: a manual for turning "cookbook" experiments into inquiry-based experiments. The manual is based on chemistry experiments, but the approach would also work for other disciplines.
• Excel Periodic Table: a version of the periodic table created in Microsoft Excel, to make it easy to change/edit which information is displayed.
• Grade Scaling Systems: a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that gives several options for scaling grades, given a set of raw scores and a desired class average. The results of each system are displayed in tables and pie charts.
• Classroom Signs: a PDF of a Microsoft PowerPoint document containing the random, sometimes weird, sometimes motivational signs that I have posted in my classroom.
• Feedback Form & Feedback Data Analysis spreadsheet: this is the form I use for solicitng feedback from my students and the Excel spreadsheet I use to plot the data. The stacked bar graphs look like the following data from my classes (first semester 2009-10).
• Excel grade sheet: this is a WinZip file containing a Microsoft Excel grade book spreadsheet I developed several years ago. (I've since had to use other commercial grading software, but I think the Excel spreadsheet did a better job of calculating grades flexibly and recommending comments based on some simple formulas.) Warning: if you're not comfortable working with Excel formulas, you may need some help implementing it.
• Test Strategies and other advice that I give my students.

Best Practices

• Five Best Practices that have had strong positive effects on my classroom and my students.

Materials From Others

• Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks (current list)
• Index of Learning Styles Questionnare: developed by Prof. Richard Felder and Barbara Solomon at North Carolina State University. I give this test to each of my students on the first day of school and keep the results in my rank book. I have found this test to give outstanding predictions for how my students learn.
• StateStandards.com: curriculum standards by state