Group items tagged

What student think make good teachers

I've seen teachers who worked for hours on their lessons, who were scholars in the field fail miserably, and I've seen teachers who, if you gave them five minutes before they walked in to glance over their material, they could run a class for an hour on any topic under the sun. In the end, what makes a great teacher?

Example of a teacher posterous blog - instead of teaching them how to blog, just let them use their email!

Doug Belshaw is encouraging his teachers to use posterous to communicate to students and parents. Literally, they send an e-mail to posterous and it creates a blog automatically for them. This is an example of a PE teacher. Now this is cool. DON'T teach teachers how to blog - use something they already know, email and just have them email it instead. Now how is that for a great idea!

Conference for educational bloggers -- too bad it is in the waning weeks of the school year.

Join thought leaders in education policy and national politics to discuss how the Internet is changing the discourse of education reform, and how those changes are affecting the 2008 presidential election. ED in '08 welcomes ed-bloggers and political bloggers to take part in the discussion. I'm glad the "thought leaders" in American can come, however, the timing of this conference precludes most teachers I know from even considering coming we're all in the "home stretch" and rarely are we able to leave the classroom, especially this time of year. I would hope that one day the edublogosphere would truly level us so that teachers would be included in these discussions. For, until that happens, I doubt we'll find any truly relevant change for the classroom.. just more buzzwords and "programs" that don't suit today's student. Hint: If you want reform, ask some good teachers or at least include them in the discussion. There are some big picture thinkers out there that ARE teachers in the public classroom.

In a recent post about Tuition-Free Education Courses for Teachers, I pointed out a number of online education courses that are free to self-learners around the world. Most of these courses are provided through well-known colleges and universities. While these courses are an excellent way to broaden your knowledge of specific topics, they aren't the only sources of free teacher education on the web. There are many other organizations that provide tuition-free education courses to teachers. A few more worth checking out include:

A cool video from a teacher about how she is innovating in her classroom. This is an application for Google Teacher Academy and was made on Animoto and uploaded to Google Video. Great job! More applications for events and organizations are moving to the video format. Knowing how to produce compelling video will help your students get scholarships and you move ahead. Learn how to tell digital stories. Oh, and I'm so excited, it looks like I'll be at Google teacher academy in June -- it is going to be great!

Excellent video applying for Google Teacher Academy on June 25th

An interesting article that examines the recent events of Rhode Island school district firing teachers and how effective that really is. Teachers need parents support.

"The main findings show that teachers present high levels of anxiety or stress due to their use of educational technology in the classroom. Among the conclusions, the need for research on different strategies to prevent the emergence of these anxiety and stress symptoms in teachers stands out."

Bev Evans is very popular Special needs teacher in the UK who has shared over 500 free resources for teachers that she uses with her students. She has a child with special needs and is just a cool person. @tes_sen is her twitter handle. She is definitely one that special needs teachers want to follow.

The 2009 Mickelson ExxonMobil Teachers Academy is a camp where teachers go and learn about math and science through fun ways!

Current comparisons of computer science and introductory computer science courses from the Computer Science teachers Association. I find it interesting that only 33% of schools require such a course and that the #2 choice for professional development for Computer Science teachers is now online networking.

Interesting results comparing the last two years of computer science teachers association surveys.

Mulitmedia resources for educators at all levels. There are ways to conduct International projects too.

digital media for the classroom

Some lovely video resources. For US educators, they have the resources aligned with US standards. You can register on the site and organize the resources into your own folders (like for your classes.)  "Teachers' Domain is a free digital media service for educational use from public broadcasting and its partners. You'll find thousands of media resources, support materials, and tools for classroom lessons, individualized learning programs, and teacher professional learning communities."

"I Need My Teachers To Learn was Written and Performed by Kevin Honeycutt and produced by Charlie Mahoney (who also played percussion, bass, and Piano). This has gone through many incarnations, but after hooking up some good mics and recording equipment, I think we have a keeper. This recording includes background vocals from the Turning Point Learning Center Choir, which is composed of our virtual and face-2-face students. http://kevinhoneycutt.org http://artsnacks.org"

List of resources for teachers on Facebook.  Students could benefit from some of these, as well, as lessons in digital citizenship.

AP government teacher Dayna Laur and art teacher Katlyn Wolfgang collaborated to create a joint project between their classes. After Edutopia produced the video, Dayna and Katlyn, who teach at Central York High School in York, Pennsylvania, shared their strategies for creating a successful integrated studies project. You can also find free resources and downloads from from Central York High School.

Spin-off from the Facebook group with the same name which some teachers created last year. Most of us are teachers at Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas, and we like to share ideas, links and debate in Facebook, but we thought that all these posts would be better organized if we had a group so they wouldn't be lost among other entries in our personal Facebook wall. When the group started to grow (there are 92 of us already), we realized that we were missing some kind of categorization, so we thought a blog would do the trick. And here we are. We choose the ideas that are more popular among the posts in our group in Facebook and write a post here.

A slick presentation about Google apps for education. Becky Evans created and shared this and says you can use it as a presentation to introduce current features to teachers at your school. Take a look as you prepare to give teachers an overview of Google Apps for Education.