Hello!

Hello!

First of all, let me introduce myself! My name is Keshia Seitz and I am your child's social studies teacher at Cedar Hall Community School. I graduated from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2009 with a Bachelor's Degree in Secondary Education: Social Studies. I earned my Master's Degree in Secondary Education with a Focus on Technology from IUPUI in December 2011. I am currently a doctoral student at Indiana University - Bloomington, pursuing an Ed.D in Educational Leadership. Before being hired at Cedar Hall Community School, I worked at McGary Middle School, Mount Vernon High School, and Ivy Tech Community College. On a personal level, I am married and have three children.

I decided to set up this blog to help facilitate communication with each of you regarding your students and the work that they are doing in my class! This is the second year that I have used blogging to communicate with parents, and I am personally very excited about the potential for increased parent-teacher communication. Many of you have jobs or life experiences that could deeply enrich the learning experiences of our students and I would LOVE to know about those resources. Parental input is highly valued in our classroom! :)

Furthermore, the world that our students are growing up in (and eventually will be expected to work in) is constantly requiring students to learn and interact with each other on a more digital and global level. This is precisely the reason that I have decided to "re-vamp" the learning format in my classroom. Over the course of this year, I will be asking your students to try to use a lot of new and unfamiliar Web 2.0 Tools (all of which are free, by the way!). This will be a challenging endeavor for them, but it will be extremely beneficial to them as they move to the high school setting in the near future. Let's put those netbooks to good use! :)

One aspect of the class will be "TIPS" Assignments. TIPS stands for "Teachers Involving Parents in Schoolwork". Each week, your students will be given a TIPS assignment to complete sometime during the week with you. Typically, these assignments should take 15 minutes and are assigned on Mondays. They will be due the following Monday. These TIPS assignments will be posted on your child's MyBigCampus account (as will all of their homework). The purpose of TIPS assignments is to facilitate conversations between students and their parents about the content that they are learning in the classroom. How many of you have asked your students "What did you do at school today?" and have them respond with "nothing"?

It is my intention to use this blog to keep you updated on the content that we are studying in class and to solicit parent feedback and suggestions. I am a firm believer in transparency in education and I want you to be aware of the learning opportunities that your students are participating in! I also want to use this blog to post examples of exemplary student work so that I can brag on our awesome Bearcats! However, I want this communication to be a two-way exchange ... I need your feedback and suggestions to help improve the learning experiences for your children (and future classes)!

Thank-you for all that you do to help make your children successful!

Keshia Seitz