27 Tips For Becoming A Digital Teacher The term ’21st century teacher’ has been met with a bit of backlash over the past year or so. I’ve seen it pop up all over the place (including Edudemic of course) as a term to describe a ‘modern’ or ‘connected’ or ‘digital’ teacher. Basically, we all seem to trying to find the best term for a teacher who uses technology to enhance learning. Since that is quickly becoming the vast majority of teachers in many countries, there almost seems to be no reason to have a different name for something like this. So I’ll just stick with ‘digital teacher’ and move on. See Also: A Day In The Life Of A Connected Educator
Language Arts: Writing, Literature, and Creativity Be sure to see our Language & Literature Subject Center for more great lesson ideas and articles. Expand students’ cultural horizons by shaping a fun dialogue-writing exercise around Guy Fawkes Night, a November 5 historical observance that’s popular in England. Harry Potter Inspires: Design a Wizard Sports Team In this lesson for grades K-2, students use creativity, reasoning and language skills to develop a new sports team. Harry Potter Inspires: Character Sketch for a New Wizard In this writing and literature lesson for grades 5-8, students create a new character that would fit into the wizard world. Creating a Poetry Collection In this lesson, which encourages students to think about the sounds of poems, students use lip-syncing software to produce an animated talking head.
Virtual Machines: Final Projects Over the last few weeks, our grade 8 students have been working on virtual Rube Goldberg Machines, using a physics simulator called Phun. For the assessment of the work, the teachers really wanted to focus on the students' understanding of the various simple machines they were expected to build into their complex machine. With that in mind, the students were asked to create voice-over narrations of their machines - being asked to explain how the different machines combined and transferred the energy through the system.
How to Get Hesitant Teachers to Use Technology In my consulting as well as administrative technology work, I am often asked the same questions by different schools and officials. One of the most common is: “How do you get teachers who are hesitant or resistant to use technology?” I am keenly aware that many of my colleagues are not, for various reasons, gung ho about educational technology.
The 7 Characteristics of Teachers Who Use Technology Effectively I just came across this awesome graphic shared by our colleagues in teachthought and I found it really interesting. The graphic features 7 habits of the highly effective teachers using technology. Even though the habits mentioned are generic , they still reflect part of the digital behavior teacher should embrace when using technology in their class. What is really interesting in this graphic is that all of these 7 habits are also the same features we find in people with " growth mindset ". Teacher talk in inquiry classrooms « Justwondering I’m sitting in a café at an airport in New Zealand – scanning through emails while I wait for my flight. My attention is drawn to a young woman’s voice at the window behind me, “ Wow – isn’t it amazing to watch this! I look at these HUGE planes and it makes me wonder how they fly so high in the sky when they are so heavy…” Having contemplated the same question many times, I turned around to see who my fellow ‘wonderer’ was. She was crouched at the window staring out in awe at the planes taking off and landing .
Padlet: now with the ability to download and print! What it is: Wallwisher has long been one of my go-to cool tools. Recently, Wallwisher got a bit of a facelift as well as a new name: Padlet. Padlet is a fantastic little web application that provides a virtual bulletin board of sorts.
How Teachers Use Technology: The Latest Research Back in 2011, I wrote a post about the "New Digital Divide." Based on Pew Research data from 2011, it was apparent that, while many previously marginalized populations now had more access to the Internet, these populations were accessing the Internet mostly through mobile devices, which are limiting, especially when trying to build and create online or access job applications or opportunities. Just this past week, Pew released a new study called How Teachers Are Using Technology at Home and in Their Classrooms. It explores how teachers use the Internet for their own professional learning, with their students and for communicating with families.
Inquiring into the ‘how’…. « Justwondering One of the key principles of inquiry based learning is that HOW the learner learns is as important as WHAT they are learning about. Inquiry teachers talk a lot about process and the importance of learning to learn. It’s part of our discourse…but lately I have been wondering how much we REALLY value it. Enough to raise it to the level of the ‘content?’ of an inquiry? Enough to report on?