Group items tagged

Struggles about teaching. Many are struggling with helping others get into the profession because of what teachers are experiencing now. Charity Preston shares her heart but also some encouraging stories for teachers. 

If you want to see how Learnist is being used - here are Dawn Casey-Rowe's 10 favorite learnist boards built by teachers. This will help you see how this tool is used.

I love this reflection from Azhar Youssef, an EFL teacher in Egypt who is so passionate and excited. This is what MOOCs are all about - connecting the world and finding the best wherever they are. Hat tip to my friend Lee Graham of #diffimooc who let me know about Azhar's work. This is her introduction video that she used for the Mooc work. I think that all teachers in the near future, are going to need to have an introduction video. Like a resume, you'll need it to use to introduce yourself when you participate in elearning projects. Do you have an intro flyer or video? Isn't it time? I love her smore flyer. (via Azhar's Reflections: Twitter in a new dress!)

I love how STEMlab teacher Kevin Jarrett shares what students are learning in his STEMlab. The lab focuses on engineering, science, technology, and math and is such a powerful learning experience. I like this format better than just "technology" lab because it integrates what you're trying to be not just a checklist of point and clicks that will be outdated. "This post is part of my continuing series of weekly lesson summaries. My goal is to give parents & caregivers in our school community the resources needed to extend student learning at home, and to share my professional practice with teacher colleagues around the world in the hopes of improving my craft."

This permission form has many different tools including weebly, Google dlocs, voicethread, YouTube, Glogster, Xtranormal, Toondoo, and others. I'm not sure that Audacity has to be included as it is a program on the local machine, however. I do like how the teacher asks for permission "I agree to allow my student's work to be used as  a positive example of published work for demonstration or promotional purposes." Some parents are afraid their child will be made to look bad in online examples, this covers that concern although it puts the onus on the teacher to make sure he/she vets examples that are published.

There are many who don't understand this one point. I used to have someone who required me to have beautiful lesson plans. They were detailed. I spent more than an hour a day on them. So much time so that sometimes I felt unprepared when the kids actually walked in the door. When those detailed plans were removed and I was allowed to focus on the content created for the students to use and then keep a grid (I keep links, etc. to what I'm doing) - THAT Was when real innovation happened in my classroom. Things like wikis, blogs, etc. happened after those super-restrictive requirements were taken off my shoulders. I had the wrong audience when I had those detailed lesson plans - my audience was the principal at the time. Now, I still have plans but I keep it in a grid in a book and then keep copies of what I use with students in dropbox and other places. I do far more now than then because my focus is the students. Lesson plans aren't bad. However, if you spend your time making the LESSON PLAN itself pretty and perfect then likely you're not spending your actual time PLANNING, printing, collecting, and creating what you'll be doing with your students. Also, when you do things like #geniushour and 20% time projects, you no longer have a lesson plan but a project plan which is an entirely different thing altogether. Don't fault teachers for this.  Teaching is the hardest job everybody thinks they can do and few really can.

The recent Kindle updates over the past few months have quite a few teachers. In particular, if you have a textbook on Kindle, you can collate notes by color, which is a major enhancement.  This article does a nice job of summarizing the features important to educators. "The update also brings some changes that should be especially helpful for students and teachers, like the ability to highlight long passages that span multiple pages. In addition, the Notebook feature for textbooks has new filtering options, which should help you more quickly and easily find all your notes, bookmarks, and highlights by colour"

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is here and teachers are trying to figure out how to best integrate it into their tried-and-true lessons. They're struggling to integrate technology to best augment CCSS. They are in desperate need of classroom materials that they can trust. Like a superhero, the U.S. Library of Congress has just swooped in and unveiled an enormous new (and free!) resource that's all about the Common Core.

"Whilst unpacking the idea of Conscious Competence and Skillset, Toolset, Mindset with teachers, we came to realise many of them were having difficulty applying these concepts to their own learning, beyond a superficial level (assumption one - not all teachers are reflective learners). We found this quite provocative and decided to create a visual on our Leadership Provocation Wall."

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.

"When teachers are faced with 30 (or more) pupils who offer such wide a range of abilities in the plethora of subjects that are to be taught, ensuring that all the individuals in the classroom can access the learning on offer. This is where differentiation comes to play, with planning resources, content and activities within each lesson being one of the vast challenges for primary colleagues - planning is needed for pupils from one end of the ability spectrum to the other."

The Washington Post has a quite distressing bug common remarks about Common Core exemplars. Is going too much by the common core doing to take us down to a lower common denominator than we are at already? I'm not sure but this type of article is very concerning. "Each teacher read individually through the exemplar lesson on Lincoln's speech. When we began discussing it, we all expressed the same conclusion: Most of it was too scripted. It spelled out what types of questions to ask, what types of questions not to ask, and essentially narrowed any discussion to obvious facts and ideas from the speech.

A middle school teacher known only as "Seldy" shares his interactive language arts notebook in this blog post. The notebook is truly something special but even more astounding, he acknowledges that many of the pages he found on Pinterest. Pinterest is ideal for teachers and makes it super easy to share. (I have a Pinterest for beginners post for those who want an invite.) if you teach upper elementary into high school language arts, take time to peruse this notebook. Nice work!

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.

Very proud of my dear friend Cheryl Oakes from Maine who is on the Official Google blog with her work with those with disabilities. Cheryl is an amazing woman who loves children. My youngest son has met her only once (in San Antonio at ISTE) and still calls her Aunt Cheryl. She has that effect on people. Great post. "One teacher who has taken advantage of the web as an educational tool is Cheryl Oakes, a resource room teacher in Wells, Maine. She's also been able to tailor the vast resources available on the web to each student's ability. This approach has proven invaluable for Cheryl's students, in particular 16-year-old Morgan, whose learning disability makes it daunting to sort through search results to find those webpages that she can comfortably read. Cheryl taught Morgan how to use the Search by Reading Level feature on Google Search, which enables Morgan to focus only on those results that are most understandable to her. To address the difficulty Morgan faces with typing, Cheryl introduced her to Voice Search, so Morgan can speak her queries into the computer. Morgan is succeeding in high school, and just registered to take her first college course this summer."

Some more ideas for behavior management including some tips from experts. If your students don't mind the first time it is time to rethink. (Fred Jones Tools for Teachers is also a great book for this as well as Todd Whitakers - what good teachers do differenty.)

"This is an awesome example of what kids can do when they are properly motivated by a skilled teacher. This is an excellent interactive book! Great job and congratulations to all the seventh grade authors and their teacher!!!"

I've started this article with quite a bold statement, but it's a conclusion that I have been coming too over the course of quite a few years now. I should really put this into context though, as most of the teacher training I do deals with pedagogical training for the use of technology and is most often delivered during intensive face to face sessions, usually with groups of teachers working in a computer lab.

Teacher Karie Huttner shares how her third grade classroom is using FaceJack and Discovery images along with demonstrations and videos. I think that using image data banks is a great idea because licensing and copyright is not an issue in this case. FaceJack is an app. Cool work here and great sharing including how they cite sources. Elementary teachers will enjoy her blog.