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In my first post in this series - Getting students' attention - I mentioned the use of backchannels. This post should give you more information about the use of backchannels within the classroom. If you are working in a classroom where your students have internet connected devices, either through wifi or their mobile phone, using a backchannel can have a transformative impact on the way you can use technology with your students...

Positive school climates contribute to academic achievement and can improve outcomes for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, according to a new study published today in Review of Educational Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. In a comprehensive analysis of research published since 2000, U.S. and Israeli researchers found substantial evidence that schools with positive climates can narrow achievement gaps among students of different socioeconomic backgrounds and between students with stronger and weaker academic abilities...

This article reinforces the ideas we have learned in class on how to engage students in their learning.  Students want to work towards a meaningful goal.

Few people enter the teaching profession because they are passionate about controlling behaviour or disciplining prospective pupils. Most become educators because they want to make a positive difference in students' lives. However, countless well-intentioned yet potentially ill-prepared teachers find themselves in situations during the school year where they feel compelled to use forms of intimidation, manipulation, bribery, yelling, scolding, or even false praise to make students behave. These archaic classroom management techniques often backfire- as they did for me early in my teaching career-and result in students losing respect for and disliking the teacher.

If you are in 7th or 8th grade read more about the Early Entrance Program at the University of Washington, the premier early entrance program in the nation. If you are in 10th grade read more about the UW Academy for Young Scholars, the Robinson Center's early university entrance program for students offered in collaboration with the UW Honors Program. Summer Programs Do you want a fun and inspiring summer experience? If you are in 5th or 6th grade, learn more about Summer Challenge, the Robinson Center's summer program for students in elementary school. These hands-on classes provide multi-disciplinary learning experiences for three weeks during the summer on the UW-Seattle campus. If you are in 7th-10th grade learn more about Summer Stretch, the Robinson Center's summer program designed for students who want to learn a variety of subjects at an accelerated pace. Courses include math, humanities, science and writing, and are located on the UW-Seattle campus.

Origami, the ancient art of paper folding, has applications in the modern-day classroom for teaching geometry, thinking skills, fractions, problem solving, and fun science.

Low-Stakes Student Feedback & Assessment

This term I have mostly been getting myself in a pickle about measuring student progress. I want to do it with integrity, reliability and validity but I wonder whether all three of these are possible. When considering student progress, I have been i…

Series of lesson plans, collections of art for students, an art game for young (5-8 years old) students, interactive activities for older students, and podcasts about art and artists. Can be searched by theme, artist, medium, or subject.

What should our goal for student thinking be? How do we scaffold student thinking in ways that are meaningful while developing autonomy and encouraging students to think effectively when we are not there? What would success with thinking strategies look like? These were the challenging questions that Mark Church presented to teachers at the most recent 'Cultures of Thinking Teach Meet' hosted by Masada College.

"Staff and students are expected to be fully conversant with school email. Not only do users need to check their email regularly enough so that they don't miss important announcements but they also have to understand and apply the complex landscape of netiquette, respond to emails quickly (and politely) and action any instructions that they receive. Being on top of your email inbox has never been so important in schools. So why, whenever I help a member of staff or a student, do they have an email account that is bursting at the seams with often more than 1000 emails in their inbox? It seems that how email is managed in schools is, well, often not managed well."

Nice article on reaching the less advantages and using technology to meet their needs. Teachers can engage students before they enter the classroom.

Excerpt: "I'm not sure if we can successfully connect with our students without dabbling in their after school activities. I'm not saying you have to sing along with Justin Bieber (I like to rile up my girls by calling him "Justin Beaver") or even enjoy SpongeBob's silly antics. But you absolutely have to acknowledge the fact that your students value this, love it even. It gets them up in the morning, pulls them through the day. It's their life. And if you don't care about it, they know. And it definitely influences the culture of the classroom."

Three Ring is a new free service offering free Android and iPhone apps for digitizing and organizing student work. Using the app teachers can take a picture of a student's work and upload it to a free Three Ring account. Three Ring offers teachers a lot of organizational flexibility. You could organize artifacts by student name, class, date, or just about any other tagging system that works for you.

"Good questions make students think, they encourage participation and I think they improve the caliber of the answers students give and the questions they ask. To achieve those worthwhile outcomes more regularly, I'd like to recommend three actions that have the potential to improve our questioning."

Making the News 2 (MTN2) is a website designed to introduce students to the world of online media publishing and broadcasting for the 21st century. Teachers may register, doing so will create a homepage on MTN for their school. The teacher may then create student accounts. Students can then login and create articles and programmes which will be submitted to the teacher and if approved published on the school homepage. Well rated articles will be added to the National MTN2 site. Articles may be text and images or they may be video, audio or a sequence of images.

Professional Development is a life-long  learning process that  involves different activities including individual progress, continuing education, inservice education, peer collaboration, study groups, and peer coaching or mentoring. The importance of professional development lays in the fact that it is closely related to the overall quality of education and students achievements. Teachers who stop learning and suffice themselves with the curriculum content soon turn into hard working students only a step above their actual students.