A superb online class management system. Award points for good behaviour and working hard. Take points away for late homework and being unkind. You can set your own headings to customise for your class. You can even update it using your mobile device's web browser. It's one of the best sites that I have shared. Try it. I will be!
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Classroom+Management+%26+Rewards
Essentially, Bouncy Balls is a website that activates your microphone and detects noise level. The more noise in the room, the more the balls bounce. The quieter the room is, the more still the balls remain. Although this tool has a number of applications outside of classroom management, I thought it was a fun, engaging way to monitor noise levels. Ask students to try to keep the balls as still as possible during class, and maybe reward them by allowing them to sing and be noisy on their way out of class
Keep your class motivated with this is behaviour management tool where teachers can award virtual badges for anything. Choose from a large collection of badge designs. The children can see their progress with their own personal login.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Classroom+Management+%26+Rewards
ClassBadges is a free, online tool where teachers can award badges for student accomplishments. Through your teacher account, you can award badges customized for your classroom or school.
What made collaborative rule-creation more effective in building a smoothly functioning class?
It never felt as if we were wrestling with the really important issues: Building a functioning community. Safety. Personal dignity. Kindness. Order. Academic integrity. Democracy.
No matter what rules you put on paper, your most important job is role-modeling those practices, not enforcing them
On the other hand, do give clear instructions about what kids don't know. What to do when a tornado is spotted
Rules shouldn't restate the obvious. "No cheating" is a stupid rule. "Bring a pencil to class" is a silly rule.
You're shooting for influence, not control
Integrity helps build community. The most important directives in democratic classrooms are around ethical practices: A clear definition of cheating, understood by all students, in the digital age
Carrots and sticks are temporary nudges toward desirable behavior at best, but ultimately destructive
We want kids to behave appropriately because they understand that there are rewards for everyone in a civil, well-managed school.
This is a superb classroom management tool where you can track the behaviour of your class and keep them motivated. Simply click on the child and assign them a positive or negative behaviour point. You can also track their reading and spelling ages and make your own customised data set. Use this information to help you arrange the children within your class. You can have multiple classes on your teacher's account and you can share data with colleagues using different accounts. The data is encrypted to ensure data security. The system works on the majority of web enabled devices.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Classroom+Management+%26+Rewards
With Class Charts you get data rich seating charts and streamlined behaviour management. You can even collaborate with other teachers and work as a team to tackle behaviour.
It simply doesn’t make sense to try
to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.” His listener, almost giddy
with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers
the punch line: That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start .
. . blaming students!
His focus is not on
students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids)
but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized
tests)
As
I’ve noted elsewhere,
we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context
of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or
what contributes to a democratic culture
Upon hearing someone castigate students for being
insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two
questions. The first is: “Motivated to do what, exactly”? Anything they’re
told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating?
Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for
a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet,
listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of
a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by
Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management: “Idleness,
indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to
absurd work.”
The more you reward people for doing something, or for
doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they
had to do to get the reward.
People
who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational
success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to
see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat
their corporations. The sort of schooling that results is the type almost
guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of
rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning
is just a means to an end.
Another thing that’s happened is teaching that’s meant
primarily to raise test scores.
inner-city kids get the worst of the
sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning
but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read:
obedient).
“Motivation is weak because more
students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.” But why
don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his
premise is correct, they don’t succeed)? What has happened to their desire
to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which
all children start out?
if you want to see
(intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that
take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more
likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is
not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but
meaningful.
Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
First, students tend to lose interest in
whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up,
motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try
to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult
assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a
top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less
impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even
long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of
traditional grades.
Very true; especially the "avoiding challenging tasks" part.
Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely
different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades
used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to
sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to
figure out who is better than whom)
Standardized tests often have the additional
disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the
classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate
answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more
than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot,
high-anxiety basis.
The test
designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage
to answer correctly.
the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely
to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
1. Students come to regard learning as a
chore.
intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation
tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing
something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had
to do to get the reward.
2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
they’re just being rational. They have
adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual
exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional
grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other
incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are
unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see
what they’re capable of doing.
This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
They seem to be
fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump
they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re
helpless to do anything about it.
When the point isn’t to
figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to
cope with being less than good.
It may be the systemic demand for high
achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even
if the failure is only relative.
But even when better forms of assessment are
used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less
important than why she thinks she got that score.
just smart
luck:
tried hard
task difficulty
It bodes well for the future
the punch line: When students are led to focus on
how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their
performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
In their
study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that
teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and
keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to
attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside
their control, such as a lack of ability.
When students are made to
think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to
explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard
they tried.
And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as
"smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will
bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect
on other kids.
The upshot of all this is that beliefs about
intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure
matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how
confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how
they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher
standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores
and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make
sense of those results.
the problem with tests is not limited
to their content.
if too big a deal is made
about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to
think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
As Martin
Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have
concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the
pursuit of excellence."
Only now and then does it make sense for the
teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how
they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should
be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized
tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in
learning.
the findings
of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are
thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the
students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm
for learning is apt to wane.
The underlying problem concerns
a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work
in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the
difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and
focusing on what you’re doing.
The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course,
but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
But when we get carried away with results, we wind up,
paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
Unfortunately,
common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to
dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and
design of the most common forms of assessment--both within
classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous
consequences.
grades, which by their very
nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not
that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students
have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to
school.
research indicates that the use of traditional
letter or number grades is reliably associated with three
consequences.
The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.
ll learning styles and levels can be met. Teachers can organize their classes and post different documents, assignments, tests, etc. for their students to work on without the students knowing they are receiving something that has been specifically developed for their own level.