Mr. Vasicek's Classroom Music Playlist After reading my post "Music to Manage Your Classroom," some of you wanted to know some good tunes to play in your classroom. Grab your iTunes gift card and get read After reading my post "Music to Manage Your Classroom," some of you wanted to know some good tunes to play in your classroom. Grab your iTunes gift card and get ready to download some of the songs I use regularly in my classroom. Photo courtesy of Rinjith Krishnan. Come-In Songs — Bouncy songs to start the day off right. "Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves "Come on Over" by Shania Twain "Best Years of Our Lives" by Baha Men "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison "Build Me Up Buttercup" by The Foundations "Who's Ready to Party?" Morning Kickoff — These songs provide a short, interactive way to start the day as soon as that bell rings. The Muppet Show theme song Friends theme song Happy Days TV theme song Batman TV theme song "I Like That" by Houston (This is for a slightly older crowd. End of the Day Dance Favorites Brent
SOLO Hexagon Generator ? HookED This HookED app populates a SOLO Hexagon Template. Brainstorm content ideas and enter them in the fields below. Click “Generate Document” to populate the template. Print the template and cut out the hexagons. Ask students to arrange the hexagons in sequences and clusters, justifying and annotating any connections made. Unistructural learning outcome-student identifies one hexagonMultistructural learning outcome-student identifies several hexagonsRelational learning outcome-student connects hexagons and explains the connections with annotations.Extended abstract learning outcome– student tessellates (clusters) hexagons adding annotations to make generalisations about a vertex (intersection point).
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
SOLO Taxonomy versus Bloom's Taxonomy The SOLO Taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982), provides a measure of cognitive learning outcomes or understanding of thinking, that, in my experience, teachers have felt comfortable adopting. This hierarchical model is comprehensive, supported by objective criteria, and used across different subjects and on differing types of assignments (Hattie & Purdie, 1998). Teachers enjoy the way that SOLO represents student learning of quite diverse material in stages of ascending structural complexity, and that these stages display a similar sequence across tasks. Furthermore, surface or deep levels of understanding can be planned for and assessed by coding a student’s thinking performance against unistructural, multistructural, relational, or extended abstract categories, as shown in Table 1. Using visual symbols to represent levels of understanding in SOLO means that coding for complexity of thinking can be undertaken by both student and teacher, allowing “where should we go next?” Knowledge.
Using Twitter in School: 4 Ways Students and Teachers Can Connect With the World September 27, 2012 by Scott Sterling The Internet provides a wealth of resources for teachers to use to facilitate student engagement. One of the most versatile is using Twitter in schools. Contrary to popular belief, Twitter is a lot more than celebrities plugging their latest projects. Here are just some of the uses Twitter can have as an educational tool: Learn from subject matter experts Do some research and find subject matter experts that your students would be interested in hearing from. Search #hashtags for news events Some of the best journalism during the Arab Spring was coming from citizen journalists on the ground, using Twitter and other social networks to get their message out. Start a backchannel conversation A backchannel uses Twitter to post targeted messages to a group, like a class. Extend the learning outside of class For further reading: How to use twitter in the classroom without compromising your professional relationship with your students Related reading:
Allan's Blog Powered by Traduttore When I received the invitation from the new Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, I decided to completely upgrade two seminar workshops. Dr Ian Green from the School of Education here at Adelaide and I have used Padagogy101 (introduction to iPad in HE) and Padagogy201 (more advanced use for L&T) to train over 600 faculty from universities in Australia. For Singapore, Ian wasn’t going to be with me and I was solo, as well I needed a better way to leave resources in place for people to revisit. However I was completely surprised at what else happened. It was a huge amount of work to meet the Singapore deadlines and involved quite a bit of lost sleep. with the action verbs. I have added 62 iPad apps to the wheel and put them where they could serve the pedagogy. When I first posted this blog entry I had the files and resources for the presentations in my Public folder of my dropbox.
Flipping The Classroom… A Goldmine of Research and Resources To Keep You On Your Feet Greetings from Boston and BLC12 (Alan November’s Building Learning Communities Conference ). If you wish to follow the happenings at BLC12 check out the hashtag #BLC12 on Twitter. Welcome to another post rich in resources on the Flipped Classroom. If you have come here looking for links that will guide you to videos and multimedia to use in a Flipped Classroom you will find that in the second half of this post. Quick Note – I have been getting a lot of request asking if I will make a visit to your school, organization, or conference. Introduction To The Flip Many educators are beginning to become aware of the growing teaching method referred to as “Flipping The Classroom”. You see, at first this definition does make a lot of sense, and like so many “best practices” I see great value in the idea. Yes, I am a proponent of incorporating various multimedia and online learning in a blended environment. Resources To Better Understand Flipping the Classroom Resources Research Global Communities
No time to teach children to tell the time! Or ride a bike, or tie their shoelaces ¿ stressed parents spend spare time doing chores By Katy Winter Published: 13:55 GMT, 16 November 2012 | Updated: 13:56 GMT, 16 November 2012 Working parents now say they are too busy to properly teach their children important skills such as telling the time, tying their shoelaces and riding a bike. While half insist they would love to supplement the teaching done in school and by childminders, research found they struggle to find enough time. Three in five working parents complain they are too tired to show their children how to brush their teeth, read and safely cross the road. Many parents blame their long working hours from stopping them having time to teach their children skills The study found that 55 per cent of them blame their tiredness on long working hours. As a result, many of today’s young children are missing out on extra help with basic learning. Around six in 10 say doing the washing and cleaning takes priority over things such as teaching their youngsters to dress themselves and learn days of the week and months of the year.
fndamntl : No time to teach children to... Is there a right way to teach? It’s become a trite and hackneyed truism that if they’re not learning you’re just talking. We’re all clear that teaching only happens when the little tinkers manage to make some sort of progress – preferably that of the rapid and sustained variety. But this simple truth, like so many others, seems to have been systematically and catastrophically misunderstood by many school leaders and inspectors. Until recently it was universally accepted that the key to a good lesson observation was showing that pupils are making progress in the 25 minutes available to us, and that the only way we could demonstrate this progress was by shutting the hell up and letting the kids do some work. But is this right? Clearly, this doesn’t mean that we should stand at the front droning on endlessly whilst expecting students to pluck peals of desiccated wisdom from our parched lips. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for a spot of constructivism. When I began my career, direct instruction was all the rage. Like this: