Starting the Year on a Positive Note Back in May, I asked readers to think of five things they'd done well over the last school year. I followed it up with a post on my personal blog reflecting on what I thought I did well. Now it's time for the school year to rev up again, and I'm hoping to not only keep doing what I did well, but also set some goals for the coming year. As this blog is a tech integration blog, I want you to think about something you want to do better or something new you want to try this year. With the proliferation of Web 2.0 tool lists, blogs about successes teachers have had with particular endeavors, webinars, wikis, online communities and more, it can be easy to get overwhelmed. Don't Try to Be a Superhero Pick one new tool or site to try with your students during the first report period (making sure, of course, that it fits nicely with what you will be teaching). Some Ideas for Implementation see more see less
Value of Student Work A student self-portrait from Ron Berger's student work portfolio Photo credit: Ron Berger I travel with a heavy suitcase. Over my 35-year career as a public school teacher and educator at Expeditionary Learning, I have been obsessed with collecting student work of remarkable quality and value. I bring this work with me whenever I visit schools or present at conferences and workshops, because otherwise no one would believe me when I describe it. The student work in my giant black suitcase is exemplary -- beautiful and accurate, representative of strong content knowledge and critical thinking skills -- but it's not from "exceptional" students. Student self-portrait Photo credit: Ron Berger When I work with educators around the country and pull this work out of my suitcase, it changes the vision of what is possible when students are allowed, compelled and supported to do great things. Seeking Value Student-designed Greenprint Austin's Butterfly The Greenprint Snakes
3 Great Tools for Collaborative Brainstorming Collaboration is an essential feature of the 21st century education. Students are encouraged to work together and benefit from their collective wisdom.There are several ways teachers can use to foster collaborative habits among their students and most important of them all is through group work or classroom group projects. While working together, students get to discover different ways of thinking other than theirs and they also share and build a healthy learning environment. Working together on projects does require pulling ideas from different resources and this is probably one of the problematic things about collaborative brainstorming. 1- Real Time Board This is a web tool I have already reviewed in an earlier post here in this blog. 2- Lucid Chart This is another awesome web tool that students can use for collaborative brainstorming. 3- Spider Scribe SpiderScribe is an online mind mapping and brainstorming tool.
Reframing Worksheets Worksheets matter! I know we hear a lot of talking points that tell us to get rid of them, but I think it's much more complicated than that. That call for "no more worksheets" comes from a place where that is all there is. By that I mean classrooms where students do nothing but worksheets. Often these worksheets are de-contextualized from relevant work, and this is where there's an opportunity to reframe and refine the traditional worksheet. There is a time and place for drill and practice or individual practice -- even in a PBL project. A recent visit to a PBL school jumpstarted my brain on this issue. Worksheets That Model a Career Tool Students consistently worked on a piece of paper shown below. As we design worksheets, let's consider making them look like the real-world work that students are doing -- or could be doing. Worksheet used at ACE Leadership Academy Credit: Andrew Miller Other Tips for Worksheets Include the Driving Question Where Students Can See It Rubric and Reflection
EduClipper Launches Its “Pinterest For Education” Back in 2007, Adam Bellow launched a site called eduTecher to aggregate and surface the best educational resources and content on the web. A high school teacher, Bellow set out to highlight new technologies and educational tools that could be used in the classroom to improve the learning experience. When a new generation of community curation tools began to take hold on the web, like Pinterest, Bellow decided to leverage the increasing popularity of crowdsourced curation to take eduTecher to the next level. This week the teacher-turned-entrepreneur officially launched eduClipper, a platform that allows teachers and students to explore, share and contribute to a library of educational content. The idea behind eduClipper, Bellow says, is to give students the same power of social curation they would have with Pinterest, allowing them to locate and publicly broadcast the best learning resources. For more, find eduClipper at home here.
Vocabulary Instruction We know that there is a strong relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension. Systematic vocabulary instruction is an integral part of a K-12 comprehensive literacy framework for instruction. I consider it a privilege to have supported many teachers, coaches, & administrators in building a community that values word learning across classrooms and content areas. Common characteristics of effective vocabulary instruction have been documented in numerous professional journals and books. Effective vocabulary instruction across grade levels and content areas is key. I write frequently about vocabulary. You can put this infographic to use tomorrow. Download today’s tool by clicking on the tag at the end of this post. Like this post? Please read our Reblogging and Reposting Policies here before reblogging or reposting. Have you found these posts helpful in supporting your literacy efforts? The following two tabs change content below. Kimberly
Classroom Manager Classroom control, management, and collaboration at the click of a mouse Now available for: Evaluate student comprehension Administer surveys, quizzes and tests Use keyword tracking to ensure comprehension Distribute and collect assignments digitally Listen and record language lessons Encourage collaboration Record results and progress with Digital Journals Form chat groups to discuss topics Share student work across all systems Interact via virtual whiteboard Monitor student activities Restrict website and application access Single click launch of website and applications Screen and device locking Block or limit printing to reduce ink usage Easily support teachers Message teachers 1:1 or en masse in a matter of seconds Provide teacher support through direct chats with IT Monitor and access devices Communicate & Collaborate Save Time
10 Rules for Students and Teachers (and Life) by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent by Maria Popova “Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.” Buried in various corners of the web is a beautiful and poignant list titled Some Rules for Students and Teachers, attributed to John Cage, who passed away twenty years ago this week. The list, however, originates from celebrated artist and educator Sister Corita Kent and was created as part of a project for a class she taught in 1967-1968. It was subsequently appropriated as the official art department rules at the college of LA’s Immaculate Heart Convent, her alma mater, but was commonly popularized by Cage, whom the tenth rule cites directly. RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month.
5 Ways To Make Students Better At Sharing Online Sharing is something that all human beings need to effectively know how to do. It begins with teaching toddlers to share their toys, and from there it never ends. As those toddlers turn in to teenagers who turn in to college students, they learn a new type of sharing that is important in the digital age: social sharing. Teaching sharing is not hard, and teaching your students how to effectively share things on social media is important for their overall grasp of understanding social media. “A RT is Not an Endorsement” You’ve seen it on hundreds of Twitter profiles across the web: professionals stating that a retweet on their personal Twitter isn’t an endorsement of what they’re tweeting and that retweets don’t reflect their views. Slow Down Students who want to look good to prospective employers may share articles non-stop. Authenticity Your students know as well as you do that the authenticity of things on the web isn’t always fantastic. Personal Things Start Discussions
Differentiate content in the classroom Essential Question: How can I use Pearltrees to differentiate content in the classroom? Using Pearltrees reminded me of making an interactive poster using Glogster. I could click anywhere in the poster and it would take me to a new video, picture, or note. Pearltrees does the same thing, but adds the extra element (I think, since I only made one interactive poster) of opening another webpage. I believe that if I took classes in high school, like history or writing, that utilized an interactive online tool like Pearltrees, that I could have wanted to put more effort in, therefore remembering more. This would also allow integration of different content areas and teachers could do team collaboration projects that didn’t fizzle out. I think that this would be a great way to introduce younger students to an online tool that brings a project together.