Blog to Follow

I wanted to share a wonderful blog that I have been following for a few weeks.  You can find it at http://www.schcounselor.com/  It is written by a school counselor who services Grades 5-8.  It has great ideas, resources, and suggestions to implement in your school.  I haven't gotten through all of her posts yet, but have found the ones that I have read very helpful.  If you have a few moments...check it out!

Central PA School Counselor Institute

On Friday, December 3rd I attend the Central PA School Counselor Institute at Shippensburg University.  The institute provided group work & discussions on advocacy and strategies when working with students as well as 3 mini-sessions which covered the following topics:  post-secondary options, female relationships, and marginalized individuals.  It was great to explore how the post-secondary topic trickles down to those of us who work at the elementary level and how secondary counselors can build upon the language we are using in our classroom guidance career lessons.  Please email me if you are interested in obtaining the handouts from the conference.  I can send them as an email attachment.

Sinking Springs Career Encyclopedia

I wanted to share an idea I came up with as part of a technology course I took this summer.  In order to engage students, I have created a wiki which will allow them to help build a career encyclopedia for our school.  The students will take a Career Interest Inventory, select a career or two to research, and add their information to a Career wiki.  It will be a great resource for other students to use to find out new information about interesting careers.  Throughout the years, students will be able to add and edit updated information to the encyclopedia in order to make it more useful.  I hope this will also be of interest to younger and older students as they look to find future careers.  The address for this wiki is http://sscareerencyclopedia.wikispaces.com/

Courses Charlotte took this summer

This summer, I took these courses through Millersville University:


- ASCA National Model - Three of us high school counselors learned about the model that ASCA recommends districts follow to best serve students. We created a skeleton version of what our high school counseling program would look like within this model. We hope to use our knowledge to eventually improve our program of services, as appropriate for the needs of our school. 


- WebQuests in the Classroom - I developed a "webquest" (a website that guides students step-by-step through a web-based research project) regarding study skills.  The webquest and the study skills unit that it fits within still need some polishing, but I believe that they could be very useful to us in the future, possibly for inclusion in our ninth grade classes. 



- Multicultural Assessment & Teaching - Through this class, I developed a lesson on motivation and goal setting that leads students in a discussion about their goals and requires students to learn about "amazing" people who have overcome adversity to achieve success. Stories of success represent individuals from different ethnic, racial and religious groups, in addition to those with disabilities and those who have faced discrimination. I envision this lesson fitting well with the other study skills lessons that I created in my WebQuest course.


- Web 2.0 - Emergent Technology in Education - This course exposed me to an overwhelming array of applications available for our use through the internet. We created wikis, xtranormal videos, scrapblogs, glogsters, blogs (you're reading mine now); we blabberized and voki'd; we used zamzar and videothread; and we learned how to embed everything into websites. Some pretty cool stuff!


Feel free to ask me about what I learned in these classes.  I'm happy to share!