First Post
This is the first post of the UTW Blog. Testing both functionality and look.
UTW Blog
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9 Comments:
It was just too much for me to resist being the first to answer a post at the “New Improved” UTW Website! It will be interesting to see, now that this forum is open to the public and to non-union members, whether it will get more use than the previous forum – which, surprisingly, had very few posts. (I was always under the assumption that reasons for that were: That it was limited to UTW members who had actually figured out how to log in at the site; it was like preaching to the choir; and, it sort of had actual names associated with it and not too many are necessarily willing to lay their written comments about certain educational topics out for public display.)
I hope this will open an excellent avenue of communication between the public and those of us in the trenches that are responsible for the education of the public. “Collaboration” has been the district buzzword for the past couple years. This Blog should afford some of that desired collaboration and maybe open an interesting new dialog of discussion for many topics and concerns.
I would like to encourage you to sign up to post, ask questions, and say your piece.
PS: Remember that, this being a new forum and people being busy as they are nowadays, posts and replies will probably be few and far between at first. Don’t expect immediate replies, but don’t give up, keep checking back with the site.
Pardon the gobbledygook text in my previous post. We live and learn as we go at unfamiliar sites. I had copied and pasted text from a Word document into the Blog textbox and, even though I had used a fairly common font (Times New Roman), it wasn’t very well accepted. It appears that the default font is: Trebuchet MS.
Hmmmm. Interesting. Those marks only seem to appear in places where I had placed punctuation such as parenthesis and quotation marks. Does anyone have any suggestions for solving this situation? I would really rather not peck into a text box. I would rather be able to check my spelling and grammar and to then import it. How about some dialog on this matter?
I guess everything comes out alright once you go back to the home page and come back to the comment. So everything works fine and it seems to accept imported text. Next topic ;)
PLC's can work if District Administration lives up to their end of the proposed agreement and allows the teachers to determine the material to review in teams -- in teams/groups that makes sense to the individual schools.
I feel as though we are being duped with the Curriculum people trying to make a 'protocol' to follow to increase paperwork, preparation time and follow-up for teachers in a whole group setting. This is a huge waste of time, and it creates distrust between teachers and what was communicated at the bargaining table. I voted in support of this contract because I felt that PLC's would be successful being teacher led, not district led via campus support and instructional facilitators initially or anytime in between.
USD 259 better be careful here. With teachers in demand due to expanded openings and better pay elsewhere, this is the last thing this district can afford - to offend staff by increasing their already heavy workload and have them look elsewhere because of a power struggle with Curriculum.
I am outraged! If Tuesday's downtown meeting about PLC time does not remove this 'protocol' from the teacher workload and subsequent whole group meeting, then I feel as though the Teacher's Union may have a recall (if the contract is ratified). Stay Involved and do not take a passive stance!!
I agree with everything you have said common sense, but let's have some trust that our leadership has a handle on this problem. I too will be at the PLC training on Tuesday to hear the "message" Learning Services will be delivering. I'm sure the UTW Leadership will be there as well. I guess in this case, patience is in order.
I am very interested to hear about this meeting.
Please start new posts about Investigations and (if you don't mind) one about the sequence and pacing guides in math and reading. I know that many teachers are anxious to speak out about these things.
Could you please change the first page to white background. My old eyes are having trouble reading the posts. Thanks.
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