Timer+ Some Useful Educational iPad Games for Your Students August 28, 2014 A fun game can be a great way to deliver instruction, especially during a break from school. It can make education more engaging for even the most recalcitrant student. And sometimes they can be pretty fun for adults too. Tesseract The game consists of rolling a golden sphere to each surface of a hypercube. Fluids can move in strange and mysterious ways, often counter to what we expect. Players will race (Multiplayer mode using WIFI) or practice (single player mode) in identifying two locations (ordered pairs) on the grid, drawing a straight line from one edge of the gameboard to the other passing through the two locations identified, scoring points for each shape that his or her line touches or through which his or her line passes that are located in all four quadrants of the coordinate grid. Numbler is a game where players build math equations in a familiar crossword style board.
30/30 Audiobooks from Audible Too Noisy Lite 12 Useful Websites to Improve Your Writing by Johnny Webber 1. Words-to-Use.com – A different kind of thesaurus. 2. OneLook.com – One quick dictionary search tool. 3. 4. 5. 750words.com – Write three new pages every day. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 3 Strategies to Improve Student Writing Instantly Editor's Note: A version of this post first appeared on Techie Teacher and Character Coach. "But Miss Parrish, I can't think of anything to write!" Haven't we all heard similar lines in our classrooms? We see hesitant writers sit with a pencil in their hands and a paper on their desks, almost as if they have been handicapped by the task we asked them to do. How is it that some students have so much to say when talking out loud, but when a pencil is put into their hand they suddenly hesitate, struggle and have nothing to say? The answer is to simply have them produce "writing" without technically "writing" at all. Strategies That Work 1. Have your student stand up while you sit in his or her seat. 2. Identify a way that your students can audio record themselves "speaking" their essay rather than "writing" it. 3. Identify an app or tool that will transcribe speaking into text. Communication Before Craft How have you helped students write without putting pen to paper (or pixel to page)?
National Punctuation Day Aesop's Quest How to make a fortune without ‘doing’ anything: The Uber, Airbnb story Uber is much in the news recently, for mostly the wrong reasons. One of its senior executives threatened to investigate journalists who wrote negative things about the taxi service platform. An Uber passenger was allegedly attacked by a driver. And an Uber-affiliated driver ran over a pedestrian in San Francisco. Without downplaying the seriousness of these events, I believe the fundamental issues posed by Uber have less to do with the company’s specifics and more to do with a business model that works by offloading responsibilities, something that many other platform companies—businesses that make money by making connections rather than providing a real product or service—do as well. This summer, I used Airbnb to rent a house in Claremont, Calif. Four weeks before the reservation date, I tried to reach her. What a great business model. Making a business out of not being responsible Similarly, eBay is not a retailer. Give these companies credit for learning from experience.
5 Fantastic, Fast Formative Assessment Tools I thought I could read my students' body language. I was wrong. As an experiment, I used Socrative when I taught binary numbers. What I learned forever changed my views on being a better teacher. Why Formative Assessment Makes Better Teachers Formative assessment is done as students are learning. Here's what happened in my classroom. "We've got this, it's easy," they said. I looked at the other students and asked, "Do you have this?" They nodded their heads furiously up and down in a "yes." My teacher instincts said that everyone knew it, but I decided to experiment. I was floored. I taught for another few minutes and gave them another problem. But the end result was not what you think. I am sold. Good teachers in every subject will adjust their teaching based upon what students know at each point. Formative Assessment Toolkit Learn the strengths and weaknesses of each tool. 1. Socrative can be used for quick quizzes and also on the fly, as I've already shared. 2. 3. 4. 5.