My 7 Favorite Tech Tools for My Class So many of my Tweeps have been sharing some of their favorite tech tools that they use in their classroom so I figure I might as well too! In no particular order here are my favorite tools to use with my students and a few I plan to use this year that I'm really excited about! Ever since I found out about Remind101.com in July of 2012 I have been obsessed. I have absolutely loved being able to send text reminders to parents about field trips, tests, upcoming activities, all kinds of things! And it helps that Remind101 has one of the nicest teams of people out there that I've met! Sophia.org has been an excellent resource in my classroom. Even though I upload all my videos to several different places for my students, my students have clearly chosen Sophia.org as their favorite place to access videos. I absolutely love Sophia and like Remind101 they have an incredible team of people behind the name! Edmodo.com is a tool that I have used for the past 3 or 4 years.
Things I Will Not Be Missing In My Paperless Classroom. As I head into the new school year, I'm not scrambling for my old lesson plan book or looking for notes in some long buried folder. All of my work is saved in Evernote and I will be sharing the work with my students on the second day of school. As I was sitting and thinking about all of the things I was going to need to start the year, I was struck by the number of things I will not need now that I'm as paperless as I can get. 1. I will not miss these guys at all. All of my student work will be on Turnitin.com or saved in their Evernote notebook that can be shared with me and acts as an e-portfolio. 2. I mentioned these guys above and they make the milk crate problem even worse. Again, having students use their Evernote accounts to save all of their work, I do not need them to keep binders to store assignments. I have wasted countless hours waiting in line for the copier, fixing the jams others have left and trying to figure out how to replace the toner in the new copier. 4. 5.
6 Learning Technologies Teachers Should Break Down And Embrace by James Petzke Teachers in today’s world have finally begun to embrace technology. This makes sense seeing as we live in a world where the ability to work with technology is key in virtually any profession. In fact, teachers that don’t do so are in many ways doing their students a disservice. There are a few, though, that have never really caught on the way they might have. 6 Learning Technologies Teachers Should Break Down And Embrace 1. The latest successful social media platform, Vine in the classroom allows you to create and share short videos. All teachers seem to use some sort of quick one liner, analogy, or joke that helps students understand a topic. 2. I just graduated from High School a year ago, and it shocked me that during my four years I never once had a teacher tell me to use Khan Academy, or implement it in a lesson. If you haven’t heard of it, Khan Academy is a fantastic resource for students to learn concepts. 3. Missing school is always tough on students. 4. 5. 6.
Critically Examining What You Teach by Grant Wiggins, Ph.D, Authentic Education In my 100th blog post I complained about the course called ‘algebra’. Some commenters misunderstood the complaint. The issue, then, is not ‘algebra’ or ‘history’ but what we mean by ‘course of study’. Notice that I haven’t merely defined a course. Textbooks Are Tools, Not Courses or Content Areas Next time I will say a bit more about my criteria, but we can’t ignore the other lurking issue in this discussion: ‘coverage’, i.e. teachers marching through the pages in a textbook. The textbook does not know your personal or school priorities; the textbook does not know your students; the textbook doesn’t identify any priorities or through lines that unite all the chapters, etc. It doesn’t matter how good the textbook is. 7 Prompts That Every Teacher Of A Well-Designed Course Should Be Able To Answer Here are some simple prompts that a teacher who has really thought through the course as a course should be able to answer: Websites Books
Going 1-to-1 This Fall? Seven Topics to Include in Your iPad Boot Camp If you’re in the midst of rolling out iPads or tablets into classrooms this fall, we can help. More and more schools have been implementing a 1-to-1 iPad or tablet model, providing one device per student and enabling youth to become more prepared 21st-century learners. While this structural shift is exciting, it also requires significant planning. Adequate teacher training, tech support, loss prevention, bandwidth, and parental involvement are all factors that must be addressed before the devices are even rolled out in classrooms. Technology coordinator for John Fiske Elementary School Kenyatta Forbes recently described some of the pressures of “going 1-to-1,” a transition her school will make this fall. To help ease some of this apprehension she and other educators are working through, we recently created the 1-to-1 Essentials Program for administrators who, like Forbes, will be tasked with rolling out devices into classrooms this fall.
RoomRecess.com - Free Online Educational Games for Elementary Children Remake Your Class: 6 Steps to Get Started At my design consultancy, TheThirdTeacher+, we believe that, whether it is a large-scale transformation or a small-scale hack, redesigning your classroom is a fun and empowering adventure. When you involve your students, colleagues and community, you can create a powerful conversation about the role of the environment in the student learning experience. We worked with Edutopia, a collection of creative collaborators and volunteers to help Steve Mattice, a math teacher at Roosevelt Middle School, reimagine his classroom. You can watch the transformation unfold in these videos. Here are the steps that can help you get started today. 1. Remaking your physical environment is an exciting way to transform your teaching practice and your students' learning experience. 2. After giving yourself the permission to playfully begin, it's time to discover. Reflect on the status quo: Grab a pen and post-its. 3. Remaking your class can happen at any scale. 4. 5. 6.
Teachers Favored Web 2.0 Tools At 14.2 tweets/minute, #EdTechChat was moving on Monday, August 19. (When school’s in session, #EdTechChat can log up to 2,000 tweets during the hour with several hundred participants.) Susan Bearden, Sharon Plante, and I co-moderated this week’s discussion on Web 2.0 tools, asking tweeps to share the benefits and challenges of using Web 2.0 tools, which ones are their favorites, and where they go to find new resources. One of the most retweeted tweets captures why educators incorporate Web 2.0 tools into their classrooms: “@julnilsmith: Web 2.0 tools make students MAKERS - not just MEMORIZERS. “ Many other participants echoed that these kinds of tools can expand opportunities for students-- particularly by providing them with an authentic audience and allowing them to collaborate with peers worldwide. Want to join the conversation? Just how easy do tools need to be to support teachers? Scott wasn’t alone with his question. · Animoto · Aurasma · Citelighter · CK12Foundation · ClassDojo
A Great Edmodo Cheat Sheet for Teachers Edmodo is a social networking website that has a huge potential in education. Thousands of teachers and educators have already started using it with their students and I personally believe that more and more educators will flock to it. Edmodo provides a wide variety of features and services for teachers including the ability to create classroom groups where teachers and students get to share learning materials. The cheat sheet below sheds more light on what Edmodo is and how you can use it to first create your account, then set up your classroom group and finally a few words on how to post stuff on it. related : A Handy Guide to Everything Teachers Need to Know about Edmodo If you are planning to use Edmodo with your students this school year, which I hope you are, the sheet below will definitely be of great help. Click HERE to access to original cheat sheet.
A Really, Really Well-Written Set Of Classroom Rules A Really, Really Well-Written Set Of Classroom Rules Well, actually 2. You could make the argument that they’re too simple I guess. Or that they seem elementary and wouldn’t work beyond 4th grade. But I’m not so sure. But if you count yourself among another group–one that hopes that behavior is not only learned, but a product of self-awareness and self-respect–then a new tact must be taken. The first one (from postermywall.com) is fairly traditional, but simplified and almost entirely focused on the human being the rules were written for, rather than the rules themselves. The one below (from loveandlogic.com) is also simple, but masterfully walks the student through the typical escalation of a “problem.” It also ends where it started: with a self-aware student, this time pro-actively reaching out to correct themselves or some perceived injustice, giving them a voice, and a written contract to interact with the teacher on (somewhat) even ground.