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"As elementary students learn how to read, teachers administer reading fluency tests and listen to students read passages. During these reading fluency tests, teachers listen for speed, accuracy, and expression. Nothing can replace this formal assessment, but it's helpful to teach students to track their words per minute between these reading fluency assessments. Tracking their words per minute can help students to appreciate that the more they practice reading a passage, the more words they will be able to read in a minute. In a coaching session with a second-grade teacher, I suggested we try using Voice Typing in Google Documents to help students track how many words they read in a minute. I hoped that giving them the tools to track their words per minute might motivate them to stay focused on the task of reading a challenging passage."

"On supply, normal rules don't apply. You may be left a set of plans, fully resourced, for the day. Or you may turn up with five minutes (10 minutes after you received the call to go) before the children arrive, to an empty desk, a missing laptop, and no password for the photocopier. You don't know that the children have some work to finish off in any spare five minutes. You need to make sure that the children are fully occupied and engaging with their task to help minimise fuss and poor behaviour. You may be warned assembly is a 9:30 sharp, only to arrive and discover that it has been cancelled for today. In short, you need help! From five minute time fillers, to whole session activities ideas on the hop, apps are an essential tool for supply teachers."

"According to a study conducted in the chemistry department of the Catholic University done by Diane M. Bunce, Elizabeth A. Flens, and Kelly Y. Neiles in Washington D.C., it was found that while the original belief of the 10-15 minute attention span may be true, it was not the whole truth. Here is the rest of the story. It is true that the first lapse of attention (or first break in attention) occurred at approximately the 10-18 minute mark, but after this initial break, the later attention lapses occurred more and more frequently. By the end of class, attention breaks were cycling every 3-4 minutes. In other words, in the last parts of class, students are only paying attention for 3-4 minutes at a time! So what does this mean for you? This means that introducing different elements into the routine may benefit both you and your students by helping them pay more attention so that you can be a more effective teacher. This is where the pomodoro method comes in."

"Excerpted from Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies For Joyful Classrooms (c) 2017 by Timothy D. Walker. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton.  Schedule brain breaks Like a zombie, Sami*-one of my fifth graders-lumbered over to me and hissed, "I think I'm going to explode! I'm not used to this schedule." And I believed him. An angry red rash was starting to form on his forehead. Yikes, I thought, what a way to begin my first year of teaching in Finland. It was only the third day of school, and I was already pushing a student to the breaking point. When I took him aside, I quickly discovered why he was so upset. Throughout this first week of school, I had gotten creative with my fifth grade timetable. If you recall, students in Finland normally take a fifteen-minute break for every forty-five minutes of instruction. During a typical break, the children head outside to play and socialize with friends. I didn't see the point of these frequent pit stops. As a teacher in the United States, I'd usually spent consecutive hours with my students in the classroom. And I was trying to replicate this model in Finland. The Finnish way seemed soft, and I was convinced that kids learned better with longer stretches of instructional time. So I decided to hold my students back from their regularly scheduled break and teach two forty-five-minute lessons in a row, followed by a double break of thirty minutes. Now I knew why the red dots had appeared on Sami's forehead."

"Who doesn't want to improve the tone of the whole day in 5 minutes or less? What better commitment to make in the new year than to positively impact your own life, the lives of those around you, and your school's culture? The science of character strengths and social emotional learning (SEL) is well-documented and quite actionable. All that is needed is a bit of intentional leadership. Click here to download the 5 to Thrive Toolkit! Mayerson Academy, a non-profit professional learning organization, launched the "5 to Thrive Challenge" to encourage education leaders to dedicate five minutes each day over the next month to engage in simple activities that will reframe their thinking and improve the culture in their school. To help get started and frame your thinking, Mayerson Academy provides a free "5 to Thrive Toolkit" that will get you started."

"What can you write in 10 minutes or less? Let's find out! For a quick creative writing exercise, try one of the 21 writing prompts below, excerpted from Chronicle Books' 642 Tiny Things to Write About. Each prompt was created by a writing teacher at the San Francisco Writers Grotto to be done in 10 minutes or less. For a bigger creative challenge, do one writing prompt a day for 21 days."

"Many American teenagers try to put in a full day of school, homework, after-school activities, sports and college prep on too little sleep. As evidence grows that chronic sleep deprivation puts teens at risk for physical and mental health problems, there is increasing pressure on school districts around the country to consider a later start time. In Seattle, school and city officials recently made the shift. Beginning with the 2016-2017 school year, the district moved the official start times for middle and high schools nearly an hour later, from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. This was no easy feat; it meant rescheduling extracurricular activities and bus routes. But the bottom line goal was met: Teenagers used the extra time to sleep in. Researchers at the University of Washington studied the high school students both before and after the start-time change. Their findings appear in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. They found students got 34 minutes more sleep on average with the later school start time. This boosted their total nightly sleep from 6 hours and 50 minutes to 7 hours and 24 minutes."

"What if you could squeeze an extra ten minutes out of your busy day and devote them to more meaningful interactions with students, colleagues and parents? While a school day is estimated to be around 6.7 hours, every educator knows that a teacher's workday is much longer. Carving out extra time in a teaching day may seem like a tall order for many educators, who often must steal hours from their evenings, cutting into their own professional development time and tipping the scales on their work-life balance. While a school day is estimated to be around 6.7 hours, every educator knows that a teacher's workday is much longer. Add the time required for all the other parts of the job-lesson planning, providing students extra support, grading, and parent and staff meetings-and teachers can expect to put in a 12- to 16-hour workday. Recent advancements in data analytics and artificial intelligence, however, may help teachers gain back some of those hours. These technologies offer new efficiencies and insights into classroom learning, allowing educators to harness the power of data from their learning management systems (LMSs) and freeing them up to focus their time on activities that truly lead to better learning outcomes."

"On the night of Monday, June 13, someone stole my 12.9-inch iPad Pro from my bag during the annual Beard Bash event. I won't go into the gritty details, but suffice it to say my valuables (as well as those of my colleague Serenity Caldwell) were in a secure location. Unfortunately, secure doesn't always mean nothing bad will happen, and in this case, something bad did happen: My iPad Pro was removed from my bag, Serenity's belongings were stuffed into my bag to make it look full (I guess), and the iPad Pro went bye-bye. The night of the theft, long after Serenity and I had stashed our belongings, she approached me and asked why I'd put her coat inside my bag (which, of course, I hadn't done). After a minute or two of self doubt: "Had I put her coat in my bag? Maybe I just don't remember," I was certain I hadn't misremembered. I ran to our belongings to check out what happened and flew into a bit of a panic when I realized my iPad was definitely gone. I took a minute to pull myself together and got to work tracking down my missing iPad Pro."

"In the past year I have received numerous emails asking the best and easiest way to go about designing 'apps' for classes etc. The question varies depending on what type of functionality they desire, however for anyone looking to build an app that links together content from multiple web sources such as RSS Feeds, YouTube videos, twitter accounts etc then I am recommending two tools to get this done in a matter of minutes."

"Flurry: Mobile App Usage Up To 94 Minutes Per Day"

"YouTube is definitely one of the video repositories we teachers and educators use to look for educational video resources to share with our students. But what if the video you find is 30 minutes long and the segment that you want to share from this video is only two minutes long.Would you share the whole video then forward play it to the part you want or is there another simpler way to do it?"

"Third graders played for just 10 minutes per day, 3 days a week, for four weeks. The comparison group's class received the same materials and the same instruction, but didn't play the game. The result of playing was a staggering 20.5% improvement after just two hours of self-guided play."

"The premise is simple: start with a quick tour of the facility and very brief show-and-tell of the tools (less than 30 minutes!), follow with a group brainstorming session around project ideas (less than 30 minutes!), then form groups to jump into projects. Even before lunch on the first day, groups were already sketching and tinkering with Hummingbird Robotics kits, MaKeyMaKeys, cardboard and MakeDo's, and more. For two days, I jumped in to help groups, learned new tools myself (LittleBits!), fetched tools and supplies as needed (copper tape! wire strippers!), recommended resources and suppliers (Sparkfun! DigiKey!), and acted as cheerleader for teachers pushing themselves to learn incredible new skills and create amazing artifacts of their learning. The final projects blew ALL of us coaches away! The absolute best part, from my perspective, is that every single project was immediately applicable back in the participant's classroom. Most of them are generally applicable in any learning environment! Serious high school science content, literature and history, elementary grades, even social/emotional learning… This was absolutely the most excellent collection of practical and academically-oriented maker projects I've seen!"

Via PC WORLD : CallingAmerica, an ad-heavy but otherwise free alternative to GizmoCall. Like the latter, CallingAmerica requires no software; all you need is your browser. In fact, you don't even need to sign up: Just enter the phone number for anywhere in the U.S. or Canada and click FreeCall Now. You can make an unlimited number of calls this way, but each one is limited to two minutes. By registering (also free), the call cap gets raised to 15 minutes.

From M. Wesch - "presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. This was tons of fun to present. I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result." more info: http://mediatedcultures.net

Howard Rhiengold, quoting Ernest Hemingway from 1954: "Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him." Have twenty minutes to spare? Even better, have twenty minutes to spare at a staff meeting? Which this video with your staff. Read the accompanying blog

What is Spotlight? Spotlight is a daily 15 minute radio program. It uses a special English method of broadcasting. This makes Spotlight easier for many people to understand, no matter where in the world they live. We use: * fewer words (a vocabulary of 1500 words) * slower speed (about 90 words per minute, or half the normal speaking speed) * shorter sentences * read more People use Spotlight to help with English. But Spotlight is a real radio program, not just a lesson.

"This week's pick is Animoto Video Maker, a great little app for turning your iPad and iOS photos into polished and pro looking videos in just a few minutes. Animoto is easy to use so you can produce a short video to share with family and friends very quickly. I've used it often to send a video link to family members who couldn't make it to an event within minutes of the event ending."