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Only those who have taught a class for a year, who have struggled with the challenges faced by students and who have shared in the moments of success will truly understand why we teach. Maybe that is why we seek out opportunities to gather and share what we do, to spend even a Saturday in the company of those who "get" what it is that we do and why we do it. Teaching is a beautiful thing to be a part. 

Great insight and reflection on how we learn and how we expect our students to learn.

Main points are in a slideshow here: http://www.slideshare.net/sdimbert/relearn

"Metacognition is a critically important, yet often overlooked component of learning. Effective learning involves planning and goal-setting, monitoring one's progress, and adapting as needed. All of these activities are metacognitive in nature. By teaching students these skills - all of which can be learned - we can improve student learning. There are three critical steps to teaching metacognition:"

Really useful reminder of how we need to address very basic ideas about how to absorb new information and ask students to self-monitor and push themselves. I appreciated the information and plan to incorporate the wrappers!

SpellingCity.com has: - Over 42,000 spelling words and ten learning games! - A REAL person who says each word and sentence. - Free home pages for teachers and parents to save lists. - How To Videos to explain to teachers and parents how to use SpellingCity.com. - A free forum and newsletter with more vocabulary and spelling resources! - Ten spelling and vocabulary games to play online or to print. - Free printables for handwriting practice with your saved lists. - A Resources Section which highlights features and existing lists for Dolch words, compound words, sound-alikes (their, there, they're), contractions, possessives, and more. After taking the online spelling test, students can print out a report, retake the entire test, or get tested only on spelling words that they got wrong the first time. TeachMe spells and displays the word in ways that stimulate memory for visual and verbal learners. Printable Games include WordSearch, UnScramble, WhichWord?, Sentence UnScramble and MissingLetter. Printable Handwriting Worksheets for combined spelling and handwriting practice can be created from any saved list (this feature only works if the list is saved). Choices includes three sizes of lines, capitals or small letters, script or cursive, and with directional arrows on or off. How cool is that?

All you have to do is type in the list of words and bam! at least 10 games are generated for the students! It also teaches and tests the students on the words. You can save the lists as a teacher and have students search for your lists or you can have students input their own lists without saving them.

A superb resource where teachers can sign in and input spelling lists for pupils to learn by playing games. Give pupils the link and they don't need to sign in to use it. Site only recognises US spelling when generating example sentences, but you can input your own easily. Free option should be enough for most users, but 'paid for' option is available. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English

Making online teaching and learning easier for everyone Over 150,000 teachers and 2 million learners are using WizIQ

Identifying what our children need to learn is one of the most important processes within education. For the teacher this is the question they engage with as they design their teaching and learning units. By no means is this an easy task and the teacher must balance multiple factors to ensure that the programmes they design provide their students with the learning they require. Even the most effective sequence of lessons is of little value if what it sets out to teach has little importance in the lives our learners are likely to lead. 

At the start of each year we arrive back from our break hopefully rested and energised. The new year brings many new opportunities including new students, new team members and new teaching programmes. We begin again the climb up the hill with a fresh group of learners arriving at our doors full of excitement who will rely on us to meet their learning needs in the year ahead. All of this means we are at risk of starting the year with a certain level of panic. There is so much to do, our students are not accustomed to our routines, we don't know each other well, there are parents to meet, assessments to be done and before we know it we are back to being busy. 

In teaching it is often the little things we do on a daily basis that have the largest cumulative effect. While the events, festivals, camps and more spectacular lessons may stand out in our memories these moments have less overall impact across the time that our students spend in our company. Getting these little details right however is a complex business that demands we bring our best to every interaction, every lesson and every opportunity we have to shape the minds and dispositions of our learners. The result is that there are no easy lessons, no easy days.

Some statements stand out in your memory for the power with which they resonate through you mind. I recall the first time I encountered the question posed by Alan November "Who owns the learning?" on the cover of his book of the same name. In four words, Alan poses a question that strikes at the heart of education and encourages us to re-think our approach. If we believe that the learner should own the learning, what are the implications of this for our teaching? Like a stone dropped on the surface of a calm pond, the ripples from a powerful idea spread, expand and gain strength. 

Behind the rhetoric and politics, education is about the outcomes it achieves for its learners. More than being about the nuances of technology, learning space design, curriculum structures and pedagogical practices schools should have effective answers to questions that focus on what they hope to achieve for their learners. How we answer this question should then dictate the measures we utilise to achieve these goals and it is to these ends that we must apply our efforts.

This resource is good to help learners understand the properties of different shapes and to use the appropriate vocabulary to describe them. It can be a very good activity if learners work in small groups or in pairs to discuss their ideas.

Rather than expecting to be immersed in learning that shines a light on the path forward the notion of searching for driftwood that suits the learner's needs is very empowering. It requires an imagining of learning as a very active process where the learner is aware of their context, their current understanding and what they might need to move forward. It demands a conscious practice of reflection and a disposition towards taking charge of one's learning. It is a very agentic view where learning is something that you do, not something that happens to you. 

We live in a time of chaos, complexity and contradiction. (Sardar, 2010 [1]) Where rapid changes and transformations through technology, politics, globalisation and the climate, conspire against normality (Friedman, 2016 [2]) These times demand a fresh approach to education, one that provides learners with the thinking dispositions they need to turn challenges into opportunities, to connect their learning to their passions and emerge from their years of formal education as self-navigating life-long learners. 

Learning Styles, Left Brain/Right Brain, and 10% are myths that we need to stop using to guide our teaching. They don't help, and they probably waste money and effort that could be used on things that actually help. You know, like good teaching (pre-assessment, goal-setting, differentiation, and keeping learners in their ZPD).

These two powerful questions framed a recent webinar presented by Professor David Perkins of Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero. Answering these questions and helping teachers find meaningful and contextually relevant answers to these questions has been a focus of Perkins' work, especially in recent times. His book "Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World" introduced us to the notion of lifeworthy learning or that which is "likely to matter in the lives our learners are likely to live". This is a powerful notion and one that has the potential to change not only what we teach but also how we go about teaching what we do.

"Teaching this class has allowed me to witness levels of student engagement I have never seen before. Students are motivated, curious, flexible, prepared to take risks, comfortable with failure and they are also having fun."

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