ISN Reflections

Something I really like about ISN's is being able to use them myself to look back on everything from the year. It's a great starting point in thinking about the upcoming year because I'm not starting from scratch. Instead I can just pick through it and improve on things so that each year gets better than the last.

Next week I'm doing a presentation on ISN's for our new teachers so knowing that I'm going to be passing it around as an example I wanted to make sure it was in good shape. Even as I flipped through it quickly I was able to fill in some empty left sides with good prompts that I hadn't thought of during the year. Even though the year is over, I still wrote them in there so that this year I have the ideas ready to go. This is the only year too where I'll be teaching the same course (two of them actually) as I did last year so I'm especially looking forward to being able to really use last year's notebook as a guide for the first time ever.

One thing that I filled in that I like better was on the page with my course guide. Last year I switched my syllabus to a shorter one that is more to the point. In the past, I've used this high five activity with my syllabus but since this page has less info now I don't know if it could be more of a challenge to find five different things. Not that a challenge is a bad thing, but this year I think I'm going to switch things up and do a 3-2-1 summary on this page (apparently last year I left it blank so I filled this in just now).

In case you can't quite read the picture below, the prompts will be:

• 3 most important things to know about this class (same idea as the high five, but only 3). This will also be based off of both the course guide + whatever we talked about during class.
• 2 questions you still have about this class
• 1 good thing that happened in school today

This could change by the time I go back to school in a couple weeks, but I think I like it. What do you think?

Oh and something else fun. Have you seen this pin yet? I fell in love with that syllabus and decided to modify it for myself. If you find him on twitter he shared a link to download the Photoshop template he used. I'd share a link to it but I can't find it again. (Update: Katie found the link and posted it in the comments below!) So after remaking mine, I thought about it and how it's not really practical to print them in color so instead I put it up on my website as the first thing you see.

Isn't it pretty? I of course don't take credit for the idea and I used some of his wording as well because it was better than what I had written. I would share a link or something to the template but I really don't have anything that would be useable to anyone. Maybe the idea will spark something though!