Literacy in the Digital Age: Five Sites With High-Quality Informational Text Editor’s Note: Teaching Channel has partnered with Student Achievement Partners on a blog series about digital literacy tools and their effective use by educators. One of the most exciting shifts in the Common Core State Standards is the increased use of content-rich, informational text. Let’s think about this. Preparing our students to be college- and career-ready is our priority. Below, we share five sites that will help you find these texts with ease and even differentiate the same article for the different learners in your room. 1. Newsela is an innovative way to build reading comprehension with nonfiction text that’s relevant. Newsela supports differentiation through interest and ability level. We’ve used Newsela with seventh grade students and saw a drastic improvement in their reading abilities. Text sets are another way to utilize Newsela. They’ve recently launched an extension of their site that is explicitly designed for elementary students. 2. 3. 4. Continue the Conversation
How To Give Students Specific Feedback That Actually Helps Them Learn - TeachThought PD How To Give Students Specific Feedback That Actually Helps Them Learn by Justin Chando To tell a student “great job”or “this needs work” is a missed opportunity. Everyone loves to hear they did a great job. We were recently talking about this example among ourselves at Chalkup as we mulled over the future of feedback and assessment. We thought it might be interesting to take Wiggin’s list a step further and think through how to make these qualities actionable, asking ourselves what strategies look like for keeping feedback solid across the board. It is goal-oriented. I’ve learned that great feedback creates a roadmap for students; it shows them how far they can go in the mastery of a subject or skill by outlining specific places for improvement or highlighting successful behaviors/techniques. What does goal-oriented feedback look like? It’s about getting excited as a student starts to understand geometry or develop an interest in literature. It is transparent. It is timely.
The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies Listen to this article as a podcast episode: Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:22 — 53.1MB) Subscribe: iTunes | Android | When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase “We will discuss.” We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results. Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: “What format will you use? The problem wasn’t them; in most of the classrooms where they’d sat as students, that’s exactly what a class discussion looked like. So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. I’ve separated the strategies into three groups. Enjoy! Gallery Walk > a.k.a. Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Philosophical Chairs > a.k.a. Pinwheel Discussion > Socratic Seminar > a.k.a. a.k.a.
Flexibility in kids with ASD – Card activity to teach this social skill to ch... Children on the autism spectrum struggle with rigidity. This blog post provides a social skills card game activity to help kids with ASD to become more aware of rigidity and to begin to work on some ways to cope. Children with Asperger’s and other autism spectrum disorders have a lot of problems with rigidity. They have problems dealing with changes and they have problems trying things new ways. Children on the autism spectrum find it hard to imagine the points of view of other people and they often don’t make accurate predictions about how others will react to stubborn and bossy behavior. Here is one of the 62 Ryuu Cards I designed with Rebecca Klaw. In the Ryuu card series, this scary looking character battles Flexibility to try to keep autistic dragons from “evolving.” Teaching children with ASD social skills flexibility social skills is a part of every social skills training method, game and activity in my products as well as in my free social skills downloads. 1. 2. Joel Shaul, LCSW
Why young kids need less class time — and more play time — at school (iStock) I have published a number of pieces over the last year or so on the importance of allowing young children to play in school rather than sit for hours at a desk laboring over academic tasks. Here is a new post making the case for why less class time — and more play time — will actually lead to a better education for kids, however counter-intuitive that may sound. It was written by Debbie Rhea, an associate dean of the Harris College of Nursing and Health Sciences and director of the LiiNk Project (www.liinkproject.tcu.edu. ) at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. The LiiNk Project is described in the post. By Debbie Rhea It seems counter-intuitive to think that less classroom time and more outdoor play would lead to a better education for kids. For years, educators have tried different unsuccessful strategies – more testing, more instruction– to reverse these trends. Other countries have figured this out. [Why so many kids can’t sit still in school today]
I Know Why Your Students Don't Speak English… And What to Do About It If students today graduate from high school or even from university without being able to “speak” English, it is simply because we are not giving them enough practice in… speaking. Ask students to give you feedback or to explain their wishes, and they will inevitably say, “More speaking in class.” So how do you manage to make students progress in the skill they lack? Common teaching techniques dissected First let’s take a look at common teaching techniques. An illusion It is an illusion to think that students will learn to speak and pronounce words with a decent accent by simply listening to a teacher, to classmates or even to a recording. An analogy with sports, music or dancing You don’t learn a sport or perfect a talent like singing or dancing by watching others perform. A French Nobel Prize winner speaks about communication The big question So getting back to the question, “What should we do?” A young Swedish girl We all seem to agree on the importance of becoming operational in English.
PBL Pilot: Formative Assessment and PBL Editor's note: Matt Weyers and co-author Jen Dole, teachers at Byron Middle School in Byron, Minnesota, present the ninth installment in a year-long series documenting their experience of launching a PBL pilot program. Formative assessment is a crucial element of project-based learning and the education profession as a whole. Understanding how to swiftly and adeptly modify the scope of your lesson based on the needs of your students will play an enormous role in their learning. When we embarked this year on our journey of PBL, we found that there were several formative assessment strategies unique to PBL. In this post, we'd like to focus on two strategies that we found most helpful. 1. What is a driving question? A driving question is the roadmap to an entire project. Using the driving question as a formative assessment Using the driving question as a formative assessment is a relatively simple process. 2. What is a need to know list? A need to know list is an essential element of PBL.
How Guessing Games Help Kids Solve Math Problems Do you remember the scene in the movie Rainman in which Dustin Hoffman, playing Ray, an autistic savant, instantaneously counts the number of toothpicks spilled on a restaurant floor by a waitress? “Two hundred forty-six total,” Ray intones. His brother, Charlie (played by Tom Cruise), asks the waitress how many toothpicks were in the box she’d just opened. “Two hundred and fifty,” she answers. Charlie smiles at Ray. “Pretty close,” he says. The rest of us can’t estimate with anything close to Ray’s exactitude. “We wanted to know whether thinking intuitively about numbers, such as approximating and comparing sets without counting, helps in actually doing math,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Daniel Hyde in a report on the the UI website. “Hyde and his coauthors report that practicing this kind of simple, instinctive numerical exercise can improve children’s ability to solve math problems.
What is Slam Poetry? Read this article about the history of slam poetry and see if you can answer the true or false questions after. Then, why don’t you try and write some of your own slam poetry? There are slam events happening in most major cities in the world. Slam Poetry Slam poetry is a form of competitive performance poetry in which participants offer works no longer than three minutes and are judged by (1 )randomly picked audience members. How Did This All Get Started? In 1984, a construction worker named Marc Smith was hosting poetry readings in a jazz club in Chicago called the Get Me High Lounge. Marc (4 )honed his idea and selected the terminology he used from baseball and bridge. The first ever National Slam competition was held in San Francisco in 1990, and a different city has hosted the Nationals every year since. Article taken from historylink.org Have you ever heard of slam poetry before? Useful Vocabulary Decide if the following statements are true or false: 1.
A doctor’s plea: Restore recess in metro Atlanta schools | Get Schooled Sarah Gard Lazarus, a parent, pediatric emergency room doctor and native Atlantan, writes today about the critical need for recess in schools to improve children’s health and well-being. By Sarah Gard Lazarus I’m a physician. In my practice, I fix things. If someone has a cut, I sew it. Kindergartners get into recess. As a local pediatrician, I advocate for children on a daily basis. The AAP explains that children who get regular recess are healthier, better able to focus, and develop the social and emotional skills necessary to be engaged learners. Children from Finland have some of the highest scores on international standardized tests, much higher that the children in the United States. Young children learn through movement. In many families throughout metro Atlanta, children do not have a safe place to play outside of school. By depriving our children of recess, we are not improving test scores; we are creating unhealthier children and impeding learning.
5 Things About Google Slides You Did Not Know - Teacher Tech This is a little cheating as some of these features are new so you could not have known!! Google Slides is one of my favorites. I use it to have students GIVE ME information rather than get information. Truly transformative for teaching. 1. When inserting video you are no longer restricted to YouTube videos. Sharing Settings You want to make sure your videos are not private. Snagit One of my favorite favorite things is Snagit. Screencastify Use the Chrome extension Screencastify (pay for the upgrade, you want all the features) to make screen recording videos (that include your face and allow you to annotate while you record). 2. You can create Google Slides many ways. slides.google.com/create If you throw /create to the end of slides.google.com it will automatically just create a blank Google Slides on the spot. 3. Hat tip to Christine Pinto for discovering this one! One of the 4 C’s is for students to “Clearly Communicate Their Ideas.” 4. Google was built on collaboration. 5.
5 Engaging Uses for Letters in Your Classroom The idea of writing a business letter with a class may elicit eye rolls and under-the-breath scoffs of "Oh, that old chestnut!" from many a contemporary teacher. But if we desire to lead classrooms where we value reflective thought and carefully crafted words, letters can be a surprisingly rich genre to explore. Whether it's a letter that you write to your students or a letter that your students send, here are five first-class strategies that address key skills and envelop your students in learning. 1. Letters on a Rubric This year, I made the decision that on every rubric and scoring guide for a major assignment, I would begin with a brief, heartfelt letter to my students. 2. When I feel like students are becoming a bit too task-centric in their thinking (i.e. their first question when starting a new book is "What will be the project/paper for this book?") For instance, in one open letter to the class, I wondered: There was no major project associated with this reading. Drew reflected: 3.
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 10 Great Web Tools for Creating Digital Quizzes June 20, 2016 Over the last couple of years, we have reviewed a wide variety of educational web tools to use to create digitally based quizzes. Below is a collection of some of the most popular quizzing tools we have covered so far. Be it a flipped, blended, virtual or even traditional classroom, the tools below will enable you to easily create interactive quizzes, questionnaires and polls to share with students in class. Have a look and share with us your feedback. FlipQuiz is a web tool that allows teachers to easily create gameshow-style boards for test reviews in the classroom. 2- PurposeGames PurposeGames is a website for engaging learners through creating and playing games.As a teacher you can use PurposeGames to create a variety of game-based quizzes. 3- Riddle Riddle is an excellent web tool for teachers. This is a cool web tool to use to create quizzes and assess your students. Add 3 questions or 30. 7- JeopardyLabs Quizlet is a great website for students and educators.
Sir Ken Robinson: Creativity Is In Everything, Especially Teaching From Creative Schools by Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica, published April 21, 2015, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright by Ken Robinson, 2015. Creative Teaching Let me say a few words about creativity. It’s sometimes said that creativity cannot be defined. There are two other concepts to keep in mind: imagination and innovation. Creativity is putting your imagination to work. None of these is true. Creativity is about fresh thinking. Creativity is not the opposite of discipline and control. Creativity is not a linear process, in which you have to learn all the necessary skills before you get started.