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If your school uses Google Apps for Education, when you have students take quizzes that you've created through Google Forms, have your students sign into their accounts before taking the quiz. That way you will capture their email addresses and be able to quickly email grades to them after you have run the Flubaroo script to grade the quiz. If your school doesn't use Google Apps for Education you can still require email addresses by making "email address" a required question on the quizzes you create in Google Forms.

A growing body of research shows that play is fundamental to kids' development by promoting social interaction, exploration and creativity. There are no recent national studies or fresh numbers on recess time, but 2005 data from the Education Department survey and a 2006 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that about 9 in 10 elementary schools regularly schedule recess, with times ranging from 24 to 30 minutes a day.

School districts that are cutting back on recess or physical education to save money or add instruction time should think twice, Goodman says. "It's penny wise and pound foolish to cut back recess and put in academic time. Because, in the end, the kids won't be prepared for academic time.

Give each group two plastic cups, one green and one red, and advise students to keep one inside the other in the center of their table (or adjoining desks), with the red cup on the outside when a group needs your help and the green on the outside when it doesn't. I love this idea for a few reasons. First, it lets teachers see from anywhere in the room which groups need help at any given time. Second, it's a concrete way to uphold a key to promoting independent and interdependent learning: only helping students if they've exhausted all other available resources including each other.

Best of all, the cups help students develop important non-cognitive (or character) traits/skills such as self-determination and collaboration. At first, for example, some students are quicker than others to give up and reach for a red cup. But more often than not, one (or more) of their fellow group members will protest: "Hey, change that back to green." Over time, this I'm-not-ready-to-give-up-and-ask-the-teacher mentality becomes contagious, and students are more persistent. They're also more motivated to reach out to each other for help. Who would have thought a couple of plastic cups could inspire such tenacity and teamwork?