The Teacher’s Survival Kit for Lesson Planning! Tips & 1000s of Free Lesson Plans Posted by Shelly Terrell on Saturday, August 18th 2012 Goal 16: Plan An Engaging Lesson of The 30 Goals Challenge for Educators I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. – Socrates Lesson planning is stressful and time-consuming, but is important in giving us an action plan for the entire school year. The way we design our curriculums and the activities we use will determine how successful our learners will be in grasping new knowledge. Lesson design and planning is important. A Few Tips … When planning a lesson, I think we need to keep objectives in mind but there are other factors that make up a great lesson. G- group dynamic R- relevance to learners’ lives and needs E-emergent language and ideas focus A- attentiveness T- thoughtfulness To this list I would add flexibility. Templates Some of us will need a framework from which to build our lessons. Structured Templates: Another idea: Map our your lesson plan in a mindmap More Lesson Planning Tips: 1000s of Free Lesson Plans
Changing What We Teach Changing What We Teach: Shifting From A Curriculum Of Insecurity To A Curriculum Of Wisdom by Terry Heick Increasingly, the idea of computer coding is being pushed to the forefront of “things.” In movies, on the news, and other digital avatars of ourselves, coders are increasingly here. In Hollywood, computer coders are characterized as aloof and spectacle geniuses in green army jackets who solve (narrative) problems in a kind of deus ex machina fashion. Hack the mainframe, change the school grades, save prom, etc. So we should totally teach it in schools, right? Teaching Skills vs Teaching Content Too often bits and pieces are tacked onto curriculum as yet another perfectly-reasonable-sounding-thing to teach. Yet in the ecology of a school, they behave differently in the classroom where the rubber hits the road. There is nothing wrong with changes in priority. To try to address this problem, let’s consider a more macro question: What is school? When Standards Aren’t Standards Yes, yes, yes.
Using @Evernoteschools for Lesson Planning Since I started this Experiment to use Evernote in every aspect of my classroom, I wasn't really sure what I was going to discover. I was sure there would be some way that Evernote was not going to meet my needs and I would be forced to add another tool to my chest while I continue the experiment for the school year. One way I was weary of was lesson planning. I have used the the traditional planner book for years and it has always been very good to me. I could easily flip back and see what I what I did the year before as I planned the upcoming school year. Here is a shot of my desktop version of Evernote. Within the notebooks for the specific classes, I have scanned and uploaded various assignments I had in paper form only and added them to new notes. Since all of my students will have Evernote accounts, I can easily share the assignments with the students in specially created notebooks. I have also created notebooks that contain notes on tech tips for using the various tools.
Grant Wiggins, Champion Of Understanding Grant Wiggins, Champion Of Understanding by Terry Heick Modern education icon Grant Wiggins, co-creator of Understanding by Design, has died, as announced on his twitter account by Grant’s wife, Denise. Our colleagues at ASCD have also verified Grant’s death, as has Grant’s professional development company, Authentic Education. His daughter Alexis has also confirmed the news on her account below. The First Time I Saw Grant Grant was tremendously influential on me as an educator. Sometime around 2005 I think, I was walking through the booths at a major conference. After hearing the cliche calls for alignment, data, and rigor as the tools of school improvement in my own district, in Grant I found a voice that–as far as my tiny mind could tell–knew what it was talking about. Authenticity. Understanding. Design. Transfer. This is the blueprint for a modern teacher. Champion Of Understanding The good news? Above all else, as I see it, his legacy is that of champion of understanding.
It's the Pedagogy, Stupid: Lessons from an iPad Lending Program Recently, we were tasked with developing policies and procedures for an equipment lending program initiated within the Faculty Technology Resources Center at the University of Cincinnati. The program was conceived as a method for encouraging the use of technology in the classroom. By loaning equipment to faculty for an academic term, we would encourage them to evaluate—and hopefully innovate—the utility of various "cutting edge" technologies with no financial risks to themselves or their departments. Some colleges and universities are already providing all incoming students with iPads. Generally, these tend to be smaller, private institutions or individual programs within larger ones. We're Here, Now What? Once we decided to implement the lending program we were excited, but also a little nervous. Load iPads with eBooks and then select and assign reading groups for certain books. How to Lend an iPad It's the Pedagogy, Stupid So, Just What Can You Do With an iPad in Class? References
`7 Tips For Getting Started With Mindfulness In The Classroom 7 Tips For Getting Started With Mindfulness In The Classroom by Kelly April Tyrrell and TeachThought Staff While the scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (CIHM) at the Waisman Center aren’t yet ready to issue evidence-based kindfulness curriculum practices, Flook and CIHM outreach specialists Lisa Thomas Prince and Lori Gustafson offer the following tips for families wishing to engage in mindfulness practices. 1. Find a time and/or place where you and your students can pause for a few moments and develop a sense of familiarity with quiet. This can work for you as a teacher as you design instruction or respond to student work, or the spaces students work themselves. 2. Have students try to notice sounds, textures, colors, shapes, and other characteristics of their environments. Being in the moment is both a cause and an effect of mindfulness. 3. 4. 5. 7. These ideas will take patience to develop as a capacity in students.
How Educators Are Using Pinterest for Showcasing, Curation Pinterest is the “in” site of 2012, and its phenomenal growth has sparked interest among millions of users. It’s also spread to journalism educators, who are increasingly experimenting with it in the classroom. The social network launched two years ago, but in recent months has drawn red-hot excitement for its unique visual, topic-based curation approach. While its 10 million users, especially women, are drawn to it almost obsessively, brands, media firms and news organizations have also planted flags on the network. Now J-school faculty are increasingly in on the act. From ‘mood boards’ to ‘survival boards’ One early adopter was University of Southern California’s Andrew Lih, who last October, long before he and many others knew the site would become a blockbuster, introduced it to online students in an entrepreneurial class to gather what he called a “mood board” for a project on public art. Aggregating images to share with students is an increasingly common classroom use for the tool. A.
How Mindfulness Changes Your Life - Left Brain Buddha Mindfulness is not a silver bullet. It’s not a magic trick that allofasudden eliminates stress and gives you the life of your dreams. But here’s something I’ve noticed: whenever I speak with people who have integrated a mindfulness practice into their lives, the phrase they almost always use to describe it is this: It’s the phrase I’ve repeatedly used to explain the impact of mindfulness in my life, too. I have a few theories about why mindfulness is so transformative, so powerful, so life-altering. You realize you are not your thoughts. This is probably one of the most powerful insights from my personal mindfulness practice. As you can imagine, this was not a very productive way to begin my day. Mindfulness taught me that my thoughts are not reality. Mindfulness taught me that instead of getting caught up in the thought vortex, I can recognize, “I’m thinking I’m a terrible mother right now.” This simple change in perspective is TRULY LIBERATING. You don’t sweat the small stuff. Like this:
wwwatanabe Schools Rethink Health Class, Incorporate Mindfulness Training On a recent afternoon, Riverdale Country School students stretched in the dark, streaks of sunlight illuminating yoga mats and bowed heads. In gym class at the elite Bronx private school, monitors strapped to students’ chests beamed their heart rates to display screens suspended from the ceiling. In a course on study habits, the class closed their eyes for a moment of guided meditation. More independent schools are pushing to redefine what it means to teach health, shattering the stereotype of awkward classes and squirming students. Many New York schools are incorporating mindfulness training to help students handle stress and replacing lectures on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases with interactive sessions on life skills, such as communication and decision-making. The National Association of Independent Schools conducted its first-ever survey this spring on health education among its members. In the eight years since Dominic A.A. “People are not happy about that,” Mr. Ms.