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Great guide to gmail with step by step directions... A wonderful resource; especially visual learners!

insider tips on using google apps

Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents By Gail Tillery Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org. You will face many challenging tasks as a new teacher. Dealing with parents is probably among the most intimidating, especially if you are young and in your first career. While communicating with parents can be tricky, a little preparation will help you to treat parents as partners and to be calmer when problems arise. Here's the first rule to live by: Your students' parents are not your enemies. Ultimately, they want the same thing you want, which is the best for their children. By maintaining respectful and productive communication, you can work together to help students succeed. Second, whenever problems arise, remember that parents are probably just as nervous about contacting you as you are about returning the contact-and maybe more so. I'll confess: Even after 26 years of teaching, I still get a little frisson of fear in my belly when I see an e-mail or hear a voicemail from a parent. But I have seen time and again that parents are often more nervous than the teacher is-especially if their child doesn't want them to contact the teacher. Indeed, some parents may even fear that if they raise concerns, their child will face some kind of retaliation. Remember that parents' tones or words may reflect such fears. In your response, try to establish that everyone involved wants to help the child. Here are some practical tips for communicating effectively with parents: Contact every parent at the beginning of the year. Do some "recon." Telephone calls are best for this initial contact, since they are more personal than e-mail. Ask the parent to tell you about his or her child's strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, etc. Make sure to ask, "What is the best thing I can do to help your child succeed?" Remember to take notes! Once you've gathered the information you need, set a boundary with parents by saying, "Well, Ms. Smith, I have 25 more parent

How will schools evolve in relation to the disruptive change inspired by expansive availability of informal learning networks? This blog post shares some considerations around the maker space movement.

Financial Literacy Education

Financial Literacy Education

If you're using Facebook, you're giving the company a ton of information about yourself that it is selling to advertisers in one form or another.

This is a clever visual poetry tool for young children where you can draw an outline and place words inside. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English

"A leading educational psychologist is urging schools to stop thinking of wellbeing as another subject to be taught. Instead, she is urging them to create healthier schools where students naturally develop wellbeing and a love of learning. Dr. Helen Street, an Honorary Research Fellow with The University of Western Australia's Graduate School of Education, has released a new book, Contextual Wellbeing: creating positive schools from the inside out, which offers a practical framework for building a healthy, equitable social context in schools."

"As a parent, I have always been able to help my children find good sources of information in order to do their homework. How do I know where to find the best information? Do I have some inside knowledge that most parents don't? Yes! How? I am a librarian… I have long believed that if parents knew about the resources available from their school library to support their children's homework they would be relieved and happy. They would be able to guide them to use these good tools without worrying about quality or reliability. Many of our resources go unused for two reasons, firstly, many teachers and students do not know about these resources, how easy they are to use and reference and secondly, parents don't know they exist."

This unavoidable and irreducible complexity means that schools are challenging place to study, to understand and to manage change within. Even for the teacher who spends everyday inside the school there is so much going on that unguided observations and the plans based upon them come with no guarantee of success. - We need a lens and a lever to manage this complexity. -  Such a lens is offered by the 'cultural forces'.

"JeffDESIGN"

Dive Brief: Implementing new technologies can yield challenges for students, faculty and other campus users that are not accustomed to these tools, especially if instruction on their use is "nebulous and frustrating," writes Eric Stoller, a student affairs and technology blogger for Inside Higher Ed. Stoller suggests institutions provide quality customer service around digital services, and pressure "old-guard" technology companies to provide systems that meet or exceed users' expectations or aligning themselves with "solutions/providers with less built-in corporate rigidity." He also advises that institutions' marketing teams and communications offices make sure that digital services like campus mobile apps make sense for their students' preferred user experiences, so that the technologies enhance the overall student experience and boost branding and recruitment efforts.

Visit Art Museums virtually. Zoom in on the Art.

Museums from around the world. Nice place to view art work from multiple locations quickly.

The Art Project powered by Google features interior tours of seventeen world famous art museums. Select a museum from the list on the homepage & you can virtually tour it using the same interface style you experience in Google Maps Streetview. Inside the museum, just double click to zoom to a location. You can also open a floor plan overview & click on a room to navigate to that part of the museum. The best part of the Art Project powered by Google is the option to create your own artwork collection while visiting each museum. As you're touring a museum click on the "+" symbol on any work of art see it in greater detail, to add it to your collection, & to open background information about that work of art. To create a collection you must be signed into a Google account. This is a great way to start a story or writing prompt, or to explore history & cultures.

Possibly the most dangerous place to spend too much time is inside your comfort zone. Only when we take a risk and step away from the safety of the familiar and the ways we have always done things do we expose ourselves to new ideas and become open to the possibility of learning and discovery. The trouble is having the confidence to take that first step, to embrace discomfort and become open to the risks that come with trying something new.

A worksheet that can be used to test times tables. The children write whatever times table they are doing (4x, 8x etc) in the star in the middle of the sheet and times the number on the outside of the track by that number. They then write the answers of the times table in the boxes in the inside of the track. Lower ability children can be asked to +2, +4 etc to the number on the outside of the track instead of completing times tables. Give children 2 or 3 minutes to complete the race. Photocopy back to back and ask higher ability children to complete both sides. I made this worksheet during a teaching practice with Year 3 - it works well.