4 Strategies To Promote Smarter Grit In The Classroom by Jennifer Davis Bowman, Ed.D. Recently, “grit” has surfaced as one of the more popular concepts in the classroom. It is often associated with desirable characteristics such as motivation and determination. In examining experiences with student grit in my classroom, I began to wonder “Is grit…
Done properly, lightening the planning load through collaboration should enable teachers to focus on relationship-building.
How Can You Respond When Students Don’t Pay Attention? Our initial reaction when seeing the following infographic from Mia MacMeekin was to think about instructional design rather than classroom management. That is, work backwards from a student-centered, inquiry-based, self-directed, and inherently personalized learning model where students, while plugged in to relevant digital and physical communities and working…
A 13 Year-Old’s Uncommon Wisdom Disruptive thinking is a useful thing. It encourages difficult questions, conversations, and rethinking of trends and directions. It isn’t always a comfortable thing, usually occurring when other strategies for change have failed. Computer hackers–the principled, noble hackers with specific goals and a moral code anyway–take the same approach, in the…
“Your test scores seem to indicate that your classwork isn’t rigorous enough. Do you include rigor in your class assignments?”
by Chris Yim, UClass.io Crowsourcing is huge in other industries, but has yet to affect education It doesnt make sense that teachers are recreating lessons over and over again With the Common Core transition, it makes more sense than ever that teachers would be exchanging best practices and methods that work Why is the content landscape so…
Robert Burns, ‘Auld Lang Syne’, & Resources For Teaching His Poetry by Michael Russell, Cabinet Secretary of Education for Scotland Robert Burns is Scotland’s national poet, by custom and tradition. He began writing poetry and songs at an early age and quickly became famous across the country for his writings. Burns wrote about many things, not…
25 Teacher-Created, Free Lesson Plans For K-12 by Natalie Dean, Share My Lesson Share My Lesson is a digital platform where educators can collaborate and share learning resources such as lesson plans, classroom strategies and innovative ideas, at no cost. The site has more than 425,000 free resources with 30,000 aligned to the Common Core State Standards,…
Game-Based Learning Apps: Universe Sandbox App: Universe Sandbox Platform: PC Price: $9.99 on Steam (though they often have sales–put it in on your wishlist and they’ll notify you when it goes on sale) Grade Levels: Ages to 5 to however old you are Content Area: Science, Math, Astronomy What Is It? Technically this isn’t a game, but an actual…
Evaluate Curriculum For Rigor With These 5 Questions by Barbara Blackburn, author of Rigor is not a 4-Letter Word Last week, we discussed the true meaning of rigor. Now, we’ll examine the different parts of that definition. First, rigor is creating an environment in which each student is expected to learn at high levels. Having high expectations…
MLK Day presents us with an opportunity to share Dr. King’s prescient thoughts on looming habits of consumerism.
The Necessity Of Something Other Than Apple In Education by Terry Heick This isn’t an anti-Apple piece; it’s about symmetry. The discussion about learning with tablets is a difficult one to push critically. Conversations here gradually trend toward apps, cost, equity, or even the consumption versus production argument. Rarely, however, do they extend fully to the…