Group items tagged

"Formative assessment can be drudgery. When students are doing the same quizzes and the same practice questions all day long, it can be less than stimulating. Or formative assessment can be fantastic. Teachers use formative assessments to get the pulse of the class, to see how students are progressing. When used correctly, formative assessments let teachers make quick changes to their plans to meet students where they are. Plenty of digital tools exist to help teachers mix things up. Don't think of formative assessment as worksheets and quizzes. Students can draw, choose, write or say to show what they know."

"What does teaching math in an age of Google Apps look like? One way is to use Google Slides to teach math. Slides presentations are basically unlimited blank sheets, what can you not do with Google Slides? Move away from math worksheets and have students use Google Slides to demonstrate math concepts."

"I was at a friends house and saw their child working on a math worksheet for Algebra. THIRTY SIX exponents problems. Take a look at this website with an image of math work from 1898. It is almost exactly the same thing! Over ONE HUNDRED years later and students are doing the same assignments?! Let's teach like it is 2017 not 1900!  "

"The gaming trend is gaining more and more ground within the educational landscape. Online games are being integrated into students learning strategies and while they are not a game changer, they do seem to have a promising potential in education. As Dr Jackie argued , the use of games for educational purposes have undergone three main phases and in each phase games have been repurposed in such a way as to align with the ethos of that phase. In education 1.0, online games which are nothing else but electronic worksheets were played in one unidirectional way and there was only way correct way for players to win ; in education 2.0 commercial games have made it into the educational scene and teachers and students started using them, examples of these games include: SIMs, World of Warcraft, Portal. However, in education 3.0, learners are not only using these commercial games in unique ways but they are also using several platforms to create their own games."

"My students create many different artifacts, but the most meaningful are those in which my students show their learning and their thinking in ways that are far beyond what a worksheet could do. When they make a video or screencast of what they have learned, I can hear and see their thinking. I can also hear confidence or hesitation, self-corrections or errors in perception. Consider these math examples produced by my students."

"Some tasks numb the soul, says Sarah Raffray, head of St Augustine's Priory in Ealing. "I'm talking about death by worksheet. There's nothing more killing than dragging your child to the table when you can't find anything intrinsically interesting about spotting adjectives." Ideally, she says, homework should inspire, divert and nurture a lifelong love of learning. Sound unrealistic? According to independent schools, it comes down to the quality of homework set by teachers. "Homework should be about engaging higher thinking skills and rarely about the right answer," says Raffray. "

"Perhaps the most important effect of the new economy of information is the need to make sense of information that is around us. "In order to do this, students need to literally create their learning and demonstrate not just what they know, but what they can do."

"My argument, here and in my book, OPEN: How We'll Work, Live and Learn in the Future, is that the discourse surrounding formal learning is becoming ever further detached from the lessons we see when learning happens outside formal boundaries. The grades that individual students receive for their school projects matter little compared to the comments found on their blogs, or their Vimeo accounts. Rising numbers of parents, frustrated by the worksheet culture of their child's classroom, are self-organizing and co-creating local home-learning networks. Learning which is "open" - outward-facing, highly collaborative, co-created and purpose-driven - offers the promise of addressing the two biggest, yet largely overlooked, challenges facing educators."

"When elementary school students have math worksheets to fill out, spelling tests to study for, after school activities to participate in, and chores to finish, it's no wonder that the standard daily reading homework assignment can fall to the wayside.  It may seem like a small concession necessary to prioritize a busy life. After all, parents may reason, their child can catch up on reading over the weekend, over the summer, or during a less hectic time. But the effects of regularly skipping that reading homework can have long-term effect on a child's life"

"Problem solving is at the heart of engineering. No wonder, then, that engineering teacher Alexander Pancic leverages his own problem-solving skills to improve his students' learning experiences at Brighton High School in Boston, Massachusetts. "I've been trying to get my students to make the step, when they encounter a problem, of asking, 'What do I need to know to try to solve it?'" Students who are accustomed to doing worksheets, Pancic says, "get used to having everything they need to know included in the problems. Life isn't like that. You encounter real-life problems and have to figure out, what do I need to know? How can I find out? And then, how do I apply it?" Teachers interested in creating more student-driven learning experiences, especially in the STEM fields, are likely to benefit from Pancic's strategies and the resources he finds useful."

Provides videos and worksheets to use visual aids to improve literacy and writing skills

"Augmented Reality is the term used by apps which overlay content on top of real world objects. Imagine viewing a textbook page through your iPad and the pictures come to life with sound and animations. This can have some great educational uses. From bringing spacecraft or animals into the classroom, to bringing worksheets to life with interactive 3D models. The tech is still in its infancy. At the moment you still need to view things through some kind of device - a tablet, phone or webcam. Can you imagine what this would be like when viewed through something like Google Glass? But that's something for the future. There's many different apps out there, but here are a few of my favourites that could be used to teach Science."

"One of the things that I hear teachers worrying about is the disappearance of creativity in the curriculum. More and more districts are ramping up the standardized exams to prepare students for the bigger standardized exams they will take later in the year. The beauty of creativity is slowly being phased out and replaced by worksheets. Standardized tests are a reality where I teach, but I still find creativity time for my students. I feel that it helps strengthen their other skills and is needed to develop well-rounded people. Here are some things that can add a creative spark into your class and still prepare them for those exams."

"SeeSaw, a powerful and popular iPad app for creating digital portfolios, is now available as a Chrome web app and as an Android app. The new apps allow students to create and add content to digital portfolios. Through SeeSaw students can add artifacts to their portfolios by taking pictures of their work (in the case of a worksheet or other physical item), by writing about what they've learned, or by uploading a short video about things they have learned. The SeeSaw apps students can add voice comments to their pictures to clarify what their pictures document. Students can create folders withing their accounts to organize content from multiple subject areas."

"I learned about the math kits from the book, Reggio-Inspired Mathematics and grateful for the power of Twitter and the opportunity to directly connect with Janice. I asked and she kindly sent the list of materials for each kit. I will be putting together a set of math kits and sharing with my students the three formats for mathematical provocations. As described by Gandini (1998) provocation is something arriving by surprise. Provocation is a means for provoking further action. I like that the book links provocations and invitations as one in the same responding to the question about "what's the difference" that I hear so often. Let's get beyond trying to define them so discreetly and get onto the task of creating them in multiple formats. "