Climate Control: Six Ways to Improve Your School Environment. Spring vacation is just around the corner, and the dreaded state tests are inching ever closer.
It is a time of year when you may be running out of ideas, patience and energy, and so is everyone around you (or so it seems). You have gone through three different behavior plans, but Madison is still acting out, and Sam continues to come late despite an untold number of phone calls home, detentions, planning sessions and positive reinforcement programs. The faculty room is rife with a combination of boring tasteless food, stale conversation and annoying complaints about you-name-it. Mike Mulgrew meets Jim Crow. What Students Want From Their Teachers. So over the course of several lunch periods, I went from table-to-table, asking, “What qualities do you look for in the best teachers?
The best teachers (blank)…” While my methodology will cause my college statistics professor to cringe, the students were remarkably honest. I interviewed about 200 students and fewer than 5 answered “no work” or “allows us to sleep in class.” The answers reaffirmed that students really do want to learn and be challenged. Not surprisingly, the answers didn’t differ much from Angela’s list either. To the best of my abilities I grouped the answers together and they are listed by frequency of response. We want teachers who make class engaging, interesting, captivating and fun. This was the run-away winner with more than the next three responses combined. Students used words like variety, creative, hands on, participation, fun, and real to describe the best lessons. I want the subject to connect to my life. Allow us to participate in the learning.
Ms. Ms. Personable. How To Get Your Students To Work Together. It’s frustrating.
You spend your entire prep-hour strategically placing students into groups. You teach, model, and role-play what you want them to do. You assign roles, provide clear objectives, and confirm their understanding of your expectations. You give them all the support you know how to give, setting them up for easy success—a slam dunk on an 8-foot rim. All they have to do is follow your clear and simple guidelines and they’ll succeed. But once they start working, you realize that it isn’t going to be so easy. Some students don’t say a word. Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: Teacher's Guide on The Use of Podcasting in Education. What is a Podcast ?
According to the New Oxford American Dictionary a podcast is a " digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio payer. " in other words, it is a digital audio file that is created, shared and heard. Podcast can also be in the form of videos streamlined online, however, video podcast is known as vidcast or vodcast. From Management to Engagement. As educators, we are always looking for management strategies to try in the classroom.
Note I said "strategies" -- not "solutions. " Many Edutopia bloggers have written about strategies and ideas for classroom management. I've also written a blog on PBL management strategies, but many of those same strategies can be used in non-PBL contexts. When picking strategies, we have to know that because they are strategies, some may not work. 3 Ways to Use Wordle for More Than Fluff. The visual word clouds created by Wordle and other word cloud services on the web aren’t anything new, they’ve been around for a few years.
However, like a great many newer web 2.0 tools, I quite often see a lot of ineffective use of these tools in the classroom. That’s not to say I think the teachers themselves are ineffective, in fact it’s usually the most tech savvy and educational effective teachers that are using tools like Wordle. However, as even these tech savvy teachers keep up with the changing landscape of educational tools, not enough time is often available to closely examine a new website to carefully dissect what the tool is capable of, and how it might be used most effectively.
Too often a larger number of teachers get caught up in the “wow” factor of some great new ability of the read/write web (does anyone still use that term anymore?) , and immediately starts working the new-found website into a class project. Visual Data Improving Student Writing. 10 simple ideas for transforming your teaching this school year SmartBlogs.
Many of us will face new learners as another semester of classes begin.
For some of us, this can be a frightening and stressful experience. It should be. We have an enormous responsibility as educators to inspire our students to be continuous learners, explore their curiosities and search for solutions to problems that need to be solved. We have the responsibility to inspire our learners to immerse themselves in the beauty of learning whether it is for their own passions, curiosities or self-discovery.
Unfortunately, the system isn’t exactly cut out to support students in exploration. I have often been a new teacher in my career.