When my first born headed off to first grade, 21 years ago, she held my hand as we walked down the hallway of Will Rogers Elementary School in the Houston Independent School District. We walked into Ms. Miner's room and Meredith's steps grew more hesitant. This wasn't the University of Houston Child Care Center, the place she had gone for years while I was a doctoral student at UH. This place looked different - bigger, more official. There were big-kid desks pushed together in clusters. And though there were centers, they were not the dress-up center or the cooking center or nap center or water play center of the Child Care Center.

As I introduced a new geometry topic to my sixth grade class, one of my students immediately reacted to my mention of a new skill-classification of solid figures-by blurting out, "Again? We know everything about that. We learned it years ago."

A strategy to help students reflect on what they have learned and apply it in a new situation.

American Psychological Association

Service-learning is a teaching and learning method that connects meaningful, community service experiences with academic learning, personal growth, and civic responsibility (Shumer & Duckenfield, 2004).

Advisory beard idea (cont.)...

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There's an array of Twitter tools that make the rounds on the ol' edtech circle. We chat about Hootsuite, Paper.li, and Bit.ly quite a bit. But there are a lot of little-known Twitter tools that don't see the light of day on sites like Edudemic. So I thought this would be a good time to start fixing that. We're creating a series of helpful posts designed to turn you on to a few tools that you may not know about - but will be anxious to try once you learn about them.

"The staff at TeachThought have compiled an amazingly comprehensive list featuring 60 different ways to incorporate the social media power of Twitter in the classroom. To make it even easier, the links are organized into separate categories. Explore, learn, and have fun Tweeting!"

Many teachers see zeroes as punitive, but teaching 11th Grade English has taught me that the least motivational force on the planet is a zero. Though many teachers would chaff under the prospect of a zero, many students simply shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes and say, "Whatev." This can be very frustrating for teachers and parents, and worst of all doesn't support the learning process. Which might suggest a new kind of no-zero policy.

or educators ready to try the idea of design thinking, you'll be glad to know it does not require extensive transformation of your classroom. That said, it can be a transformative experience for all involved. Here, we try to answer your questions about integrating different components of a design learning experience into familiar, pre-existing scenarios that play out in every school.