4Teachers : Main Page The Official Brain Gym Website Academic Superstore : Academic Software discounts for students, teachers and schools Take Note: Five Lessons for Note Taking Fun If recent surveys are any indicator, cheating and plagiarism are on the rise. As teachers, however, we might be able to reverse that trend by teaching our students to take good notes. Included: Five fun lessons that teach needed note-taking skills. In 2002, a national survey of 4,500 high school students found that 75 percent of them engaged in cheating and more than half plagiarized content they found on the Internet. In a recent survey of teachers, 100 percent of the teachers have caught students cheating. Students have always copied text into their research papers verbatim. Could it be that this apparent spike in cheating has a very basic root cause? This week, Education World offers five simple lessons to help you instruct students and to provide practice in the skills of note taking and the associated skills of summarizing and paraphrasing. Click each of the five lesson headlines below for a complete teaching resource.
TypeRacer - Test your typing speed and learn to type faster. Free typing game and competition. Way more fun than a typing tutor! Classroom Architect NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS by Austin Kleon In some ways, I’m probably the worst person to teach blackout poetry. I’ve done it for so long, I don’t even really think about it any more. Making art and teaching art are two different skill sets, and a quick Google search for “blackout poetry lesson plans” shows that there’s a small army of English teachers already doing it better than me, anyways. That’s not to say I don’t like teaching, it’s just that I’m never sure I’m any good at it. I’ve done some workshops with a lot of instruction and timed activities, but those always seem just a little bit off. I told the story of how I started blacking out, showed a timelapse video of how I make one, read a few, then told them they should just go for it. This is always the moment where I kind of hold my breath and think, “Uh oh. But these teens! It’s easy for an old fart like me to get jaded about everything, especially my work. I stole a lot from everybody in that room.