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Kids need us. For students who struggle with behaviour challenges, it is never a simple solution. Teaching 30 students (with a variety of academic, social and emotional needs) for an entire day can be completely exhausting. When discussing solutions, though, we need to ask the question: who is this about - the teachers/admin? or the student? It likely falls somewhere in the middle but it is important to keep in mind the needs of everyone. In the end, it is our job as admin, teachers, and staff to create the conditions for student success. Meet students where they are and teach the needed skills from there.

Resources on Engaging Student Voices Explore resources related to recognizing and valuing student knowledge, input, and expertise and building student-centered learning environments where students make decisions about how learning happens.

I have made a terrible mistake. I waited fourteen years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching: shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things - the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it!

For students who are prone to Googling everything, including research for class assignments, SweetSearch can help.... SweetSearch's staff of librarians and educators have sifted through the the open web to find quality, credible sources that are appropriate for your students - many of the top search results come from PBS, the Smithsonian, and university websites.

When students turn in writing to their teacher, they often don't care if it's good - as long as it's good enough. But when they publish their work online, they want it to be good. Knowing that someone else besides a parent, guardian or teacher cares about their work and will be reading it has a profound impact on the quality of work that they produce. Often, students are more interested in knowing what their peers think about their work than what their teacher thinks.

Quality feedback is critical to student learning. Calling a grade, feedback, is like saying sharing a link with someone is collaboration.

I realized then that we adhere to different instruction theories: project-based vs. concept-driven learning. On the surface, many can mistake one for the other, especially since both use inquiry as a vehicle to construct understanding. It is, if you wish, the distinction that Carl Bereiter made when he talked about shallow vs. deep constructivism: The shallowest forms engage students in tasks and activities in which ideas have no overt presence but are entirely implicit. Students describe the activities they are engaged in (e.g., planting seeds, measuring shadows) and show little awareness of theunderlying principles that these tasks are to convey. Unfortunately, much of what is currently promoted and practiced under the label of "project-based learning" does not fit this definition but instead represents the traditional "project" or research report dressed up in modern technology.

I have developed a 21st Century Report Card that identifies 34 skills that students should develop over the course of the year in my 5th grade classroom. These 34 skills are then broken down into subsequent behaviors that are observable and assessable.  (Download it here as a PDF.)

By combining engaging online instruction resources and solid offline learning experiences, educators can transform their classroom and put the old column-and-rows setting to shame! Because of this notion, blended learning environments provide today's students a distinct advantage.

I also feel it goes deeper than that. I feel I get a true opportunity to see my students persevere, problem solve and demonstrate their level of critical thinking. I am not hung up on the final results of an inquiry. I am enthralled with the process and where an inquiry will lead or fade out. I never fully know what will happen throughout an inquiry and that sometimes scares me but it also keeps me engaged and excited about the next pathways.

Digital literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet. As a Cornell student, activities including writing papers, creating multimedia presentations, and posting information about yourself or others online are all a part of your day-to-day life, and all of these activities require varying degrees of digital literacy. Is simply knowing how to do these things enough? No-there's more to it than that.

"We want to take the existing unit plans and adjust the language so they are more globally accessible and do 5-to-10-minute interviews with teachers about the unit and with students to talk about how they learned and what they created," she says. Her goal is to have the written unit and about 20 minutes of video so teachers can see and hear how a unit works. "We want teachers to see the learning potential of the unit. Over the next three years we plan to build out as many SLA units as we can."

Educators can play a key role in assisting learners in building upon and expanding their self-regulation skills. Strategies include using metacognitive reflection questions both prior to and after learning tasks to assist students through a process of guided inquiry: What is the best way to go about this task? How well are my learning strategies working? What changes should I make, if any? What am I still having trouble understanding? What can I recall and what should I review? How does this material relate to other things I've learned or experienced? Supporting Self-Regulation in the Classroom)

Here are a few blogging links: Please ask your students to hashtag tweets @ their blogs with: #cloudwriting