Group items tagged

"A survey of 2,462 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers finds that digital technologies are shaping student writing in myriad ways and have also become helpful tools for teaching writing to middle and high school students.  These teachers see the internet and digital technologies such as social networking sites, cell phones and texting, generally facilitating teens' personal expression and creativity, broadening the audience for their written material, and encouraging teens to write more often in more formats than may have been the case in prior generations.  At the same time, they describe the unique challenges of teaching writing in the digital age, including the "creep" of informal style into formal writing assignments and the need to better educate students about issues such as plagiarism and fair use."

"Nothing matters more to student learning than teacher quality. Not class size, not poverty, not family background, not even overall school quality. This was the key takeaway from a highly controversial Los Angeles Times analysis of teacher value-added scores for students in the L.A. Unified School District. The significance of this finding can't be understated. Many people still believe either that "these kids can't learn" or that "school can only do so much with kids like this until society fixes their families and communities.""

" Like many major league teams, schools may be overlooking some important metrics or even using the wrong measures as they strive to recruit and retain the best teachers."

"Helping Traumatized Children Learn A Report and Policy Agenda: supportive school environments for children traumatized by family violence. Helping Traumatized Children Learn demonstrates how trauma from exposure to family and other forms of violence can help explain many educational difficulties teachers across the Commonwealth face everyday. Such difficulties include the inability of children to focus, understand instructions, form meaningful relationships with peers and teachers, and control their behavior in appropriate ways. The report provides a school-wide flexible framework and a public policy agenda for creating trauma"

"We have been doing a lot of  reviews of educational  mobile apps. We particularly focused on the ones that work on iPad and we tried to cover almost all the fields from digital story telling to apps to teach creativity. Our purpose is to provide teachers with a repository of apps to choose from  when trying them with their students in the classroom. Check out the categories below and click on any title to access the correspondent apps it contains. Enjoy"

Where did BlueHarvest come from? BlueHarvest is the experiment of a high school teacher in Iowa who was fed up with students valuing points and grades above learning. What does BlueHarvest do? BlueHarvest is a website that organizes the feedback that teachers give to students. BlueHarvest then keeps it organized by idea for future reference as the student progresses.

"Google Drive provides a platform to organise and enhance workflow for teachers. The most obvious example is how quickly resources can be shared, annotated and collaborated upon"

"For those who might be new to the term, formative assessments are ongoing practices that help both the teacher and student evaluate and reflect on how they are both doing, and what changes either or both might need to make to become a more effective teacher and learner"

"Formative assessment, as I understand it, is an on-going process where both teachers and students evaluate assessment evidence in order to make adjustments to their teaching and learning. Robert Marzano has called it "one of the more powerful weapons in a teacher's arsenal.""

The Project-Based Learning designs on this website were created by West Virginia teachers who worked with the WVDE Office of Instruction through participation in the Teacher Leadership Institute, the Secondary PBL project, content-specific professional de

"The school has an unconventional take on the iPad's purpose. The devices are not really valued as portable screens or mobile gaming devices. Teachers I talked to seemed uninterested, almost dismissive, of animations and gamelike apps. Instead, the tablets were intended to be used as video cameras, audio recorders, and multimedia notebooks of individual students' creations. The teachers cared most about how the devices could capture moments that told stories about their students' experiences in school. Instead of focusing on what was coming out of the iPad, they were focused on what was going into it."

"Allows teachers & students to quickly ask & answer each other's questions with text & their own videos. This FREE app turns each iPad into a whiteboard that can record voice & visuals for instant classroom sharing. Ideal for K-12 teachers & students with iPads. "

"It gives me hope for quality classroom instruction in elementary mathematics. Be sure to notice the transition to a new task at the 4-minute mark, and how the teacher deals with the struggle that occurs at the 6-minute mark. Also please look in the kids' eyes. Watch their body language and their waving hands. Watch them think. Kids are practicing facts in this classroom. The teacher is providing instruction. Contrast with this (which is not a joke). You can flip this latter instructional sequence because it involves telling and choral response."

"The video library is an innovative and differentiated resource that brings the Common Core instructional shifts, teacher and leadership evaluation and data driven instruction to life. The library, which will house hundreds of videos from around New York state, captures teaching and evaluation along a developmental arc and tags for characteristics like grade level, subject area, Common Core Standards and instructional shifts and teacher and leader evaluation rubric indicators."

"The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice is essential reading for all those interested in knowing what research has to say about how to optimise learning in classrooms, schools and other settings. It aims, first and foremost, to inform practice and educational reform. It will be of particular interest to teachers, education leaders, teacher educators, advisors and decision makers, as well as the research community."

"The award, created and administered by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance project, recognizes educators who have demonstrated excellence in teaching students from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. In addition to the presentation of the award, the event-organized by Education Week Teacher-featured an in-depth discussion with the award-winning teachers on how they engage and support students from diverse backgrounds and the challenges associated with doing so in today's schools. A follow-up panel discussion with education thought leaders explored issues surrounding Common Core implementation and the learning experiences of minority and disadvantaged students."

A different idea for single content area teachers to form TBTs? "A recent post by high school physics teacher Casey Rutherford, describes how he used Google+ Hangouts (free video conferencing) to create his own PLC"

Yet even the best special education teachers can use a little guidance, inspiration, and information to help them to be even better at what they do. That's just what the 50 blogs we've collected here can do. Read through this updated list (a revision of this list to reflect new blogs and to remove old, no-longer-updated sites) to find resources that will help you teach, learn, and grow right alongside your students.

Today, education is caught in the trap which suffocated medicine 150 years ago. Pedagogy and the structure of schooling does not change because so many of those who practice and lead it refuse to confront their egos and their self-images - and this ranges from the teacher who still uses worksheets and grades compliance to Arne Duncan, Michael Gove, and even Barack Obama. And the result is... we are "killing" kids - both figuratively and literally. Educators get caught in an awful "Anti-Virtuous" Cycle. So many did well in traditional schools for very traditional reasons. They were born to wealth and privilege, or they were born to educationally successful families. And/or, they simply are the kind of student "school" - that culture of compliance and passivity - enables."

iRead will give you a chance to create meaningful, curriculum-centered audio projects with your students. Teachers are using digital audio tools (iPods, mics, Garageband, iTunes, Keynote, etc. and various accessories) to improve reading processes. Teachers meet on a monthly basis to exchange ideas and strategies. We started in 2006-07 by collecting data about fluency rates - this proved to be very promising.