5 Ideas for using Twitter for PD in your School Dist. 10 Ideas For Upgrading Your Teaching This Summer. 10 Ideas For Upgrading Your Teaching This Summer by Nellie Mitchell, thislittleclassofmine When my district tech office sent out an email the last week of school announcing that we would be getting new computers mid-summer, I was ecstatic. The MacBook computers we’ve been packing around for the last five years are great machines, but I am ready for the upgrade. Anticipating the news that new computers might be on the horizon, I started organizing my computer two months ago. Along with the announcement came a 7-page document outlining the steps and options to back up our lesson plans, files, and slide shows. Computing has changed a lot in the last five years. I’ve been with the district for my entire 9.5-year career, and this will be the third computer they’ve provided for us in that time—-needless to say, I have a lot of files.
Purging old files from my computer feels the same. It feels good to organize things that were saved haphazardly in random places into their new home in the cloud. Ideas for Teaching Better. All In One Place. So many ideas to share! Most of the blogs I write that get a good response are the ones about teaching. Thankfully. I’d write a book but a) it takes too much time b) the money is terrible and c) I’d just be repeating everything I’ve already written here. It would be called ‘Into the Rainforest of Teaching and Learning’. I like the organic metaphor because it captures something of the mystery, complexity and beauty of teaching well. Rainforest Thinking From Plantation Thinking to Rainforest Thinking: it’s quite a journey I like the idea that learning is ‘lush, diverse, unpredictable, evolving, daunting, exciting’.
Great Lessons Although I’d change a few things, I’m still very happy with this series as a way to capture the essence of great lessons, especially the focus on habits rather than strategies. 1. You can download a pdf with all the posts compiled together in one easy-to-share document. Pedagogy Postcards 10 Silver Arrows If you do just one thing, do this….
Thanks for reading. Like this: Make School Different: Think Like a Librarian. In keeping with the meme #makeschooldifferent, I have been thinking more about the philosophies behind Librarianship. I decided to think about this in terms of what I want to START, instead of what we need to STOP pretending. I am passionate about education and have also been working on a project for New Pedagogies for Deep Learning this year. I worked hard, in the ways I could, to try to make my own classroom ‘different’, and to think of it as an Education Commons – modelled after the Learning Commons! I continue to keep a growth mindset, but if I could, this is where I would focus my thinking next: Let’s START: 1. Thinking like a Librarian! School can be made different if teachers thought more like Librarians! The Learning Commons philosophy has been out for many years now, and much of this can be read in the Together for Learning Document from the Ontario Library Association, and the Leading Learning Document from the Canadian Library Association. 2. 3. 4.
What do you think? Like this: Twenty-Five Great Ideas for Teaching Current Events | Education World. Looking for ways to work news into your classroom curriculum? Check out these great ideas for connecting current events to all subjects. Education World is pleased to offer 25 activities -- activities intended to help teachers make use of newspapers and to help students make sense of the news. Also included, at the end of the activity list, is a list of additional activities and Internet resources. This first activity won't make better or more interested news readers of your students -- but it was too interesting not to include in our list!
Taken from an ERIC document, Twenty Ideas for Teaching Science Using the Newspaper, the first activity provides a recipe for keeping old newspaper clippings from turning yellow. Try it! Preserving the news! Listening for details. News-mapping. More news-mapping. News scavenger hunts. A to Z adjectives. Graphing the news. Scanning the page. Abbreviation/acronym search. Local, national, or international? Headline match. The five Ws. A five W variation. The Innovative Educator. When I was a student, I had a problem staying awake in class. I felt bad and teachers were mad. Today, as a teacher myself, I discovered the blame was misplaced. I was sleeping because of boring lesson delivery. When I teach a class or an auditorium with hundreds, there is never any sleeping going on because I have an interactive and engaging delivery. Whether delivering a lesson to school children or providing professional development to adults, in today’s fast-paced, digital world, your audience deserves to have an interactive presentation where they are engaged.
Incorporate some of the strategies below and leave behind the days of sit and git lectures or presentations. 1) Polling with Cel.ly Use a free platform like Cel.ly to poll your audience. 2) Peer instruction I LOVE this and have used it with audiences of hundreds to have the room teach the room. 3) Word Clouds with Poll Everywhere Poll Everywhere isn’t just for polling. 3) Selfie Collage and Albums with Flickr. 6 Important Components Of Online Pedagogy. Originally posted on What makes you a good instructor in the classroom – does not necessarily translate to good pedagogy in an online learning environment. Online Learning Environments are becoming increasingly available for learners in all areas of education from primary grades right through to higher education. They require key considerations to be cultivated to promote success.
The Components Of A Successful Online Learning Environment Whether you are building an Online Learning framework for primary students, college students, or for professional development among your colleagues, the basic premise remain the same – the Online Learning Environment should enhance the learning potential of your candidates. The SAMR model, created by Reuben Puentedura, is one example of how we can think about eLearning design. Like this: Like Loading...
Related 6 Principles for eLearning In "eLearning" In "Big Ideas in Education" Teaching Copyright. As today's tech-savvy teens become increasingly involved with technology and the Internet for learning, work, civic engagement, and entertainment, it is vital to ensure that they understand their legal rights and responsibilities under copyright law and also how the law affects creativity and innovation. This curriculum is designed to give teachers a comprehensive set of tools to educate students about copyright while incorporating activities that exercise a variety of learning skills. Lesson topics include: the history of copyright law; the relationship between copyright and innovation; fair use and its relationship to remix culture; peer-to-peer file sharing; and the interests of the stakeholders that ultimately affect how copyright is interpreted by copyright owners, consumers, courts, lawmakers, and technology innovators. Unit Goals Educate students about copyright law, including the concepts of fair use, free speech, and the public domain.
Objectives for Students Assessment. Education technology is spreading fast, but there’s no recipe for success. Many people are seeking the “secret sauce” for digital learning. As educators expand the use of education technology, they often face a tricky balance. These tools offer the possibility for innovation – trying something new in a quest to improve teaching and learning. But technology isn’t cheap, and the risk of failure looms. To assure success, many educators try to find and follow a recipe for digital learning. But many crucial ingredients can’t be found in a case study about “best practices,” said Julie Evans, the CEO of Project Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization that advocates for math, science and technology education and annually surveys students and educators about their experiences with those topics. Too often, educators ask how to reproduce another school district’s program, Evans said last week, when their first step should be to look locally.
To be sure, these are heady times for education technology adoption in the nation’s schools. Launching A New Idea In Your School? Some Thoughts For Your Success. Launching A New Idea In Your School? Some Thoughts For Your Success by Grant Wiggins, Authentic Education Ed note: This is a slightly-edited excerpt from a post by Grant on differentiation and the implementation of policy. Looking for a process to avoid bad implementation of what very well might be a good idea? A new literacy program, curriculum framework, technology, or schedule? Intense study of local needs – identification of gaps between Mission and realityintense study of possible initiatives, given a need/problem statementa process and set of criteria for weighing the pros and cons of possible initiatives/approaches/programsa Purpose statement for the new initiative decided on – the idea and ideal to be safeguarded throughout the work, why the idea suits our needs at this moment in time, and why this is the most promising initiativeintense study of past initiatives locally: which succeeded, which failed, and why?
Ineffective teachers | Dangerously Irrelevant.