creative commons licensed (BY-NC-ND) flickr photo by clevercupcakes: http://flickr.com/photos/clevercupcakes/2329135138
Great 3-minute clip with Dylan Wiliam speaking about the power of formative assessment.
Check it out here.
“When teachers do formative assessment effectively, students learn at roughly double the rate that they do without it.” – D. Wiliam
creative commons licensed (BY-NC-ND) flickr photo by Pensiero: http://flickr.com/photos/pensiero/3496059097
Dr. Lori Desautels recently published an interesting piece on Edutopia with an update to class roles. She writes:
“Last week as I was driving to one of our large, diverse public elementary schools to speak with teachers about connection, my mind went to a different realm of classroom structure and function. I began to think differently about what bonding and empathy look like in our classrooms. Traditionally, we give students classroom responsibilities with different jobs (paper passer, line leader, errand runner, etc.), but what if we built relationships and trust through leadership and caregiving roles? These roles and responsibilities call us to explore an emotional climate in our classrooms that would breed service and compassion. When we engage with one another, feeling the power of our compassion and service, the neural circuitry in the brain shifts, and our “reward system” of dopamine and serotonin sharpens our focus, emotional regulation, and engagement. We prime our brains for deepened learning and social connection.”
Read the entire piece here.
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This Edutopia clip outlines 5 elements of a strong social and emotional program, which is viewed as foundational for academic success.
creative commons licensed (BY-ND) flickr photo by Janet 59: http://flickr.com/photos/89509548@N00/1070827696
From MIT Technology Review, by Anne Trubek:
“Does it matter how we type? Yes. Touch typing allows us to write without thinking about how we are writing, freeing us to focus on what we are writing, on our ideas. Touch typing is an example of cognitive automaticity, the ability to do things without conscious attention or awareness.
Automaticity takes a burden off our working memory, allowing us more space for higher-order thinking. (Other forms of cognitive automaticity include driving a car, riding a bike and reading—you’re not sounding out the letters as you scan this post, right?) When we type without looking at the keys, we are multi-tasking, our brains free to focus on ideas without having to waste mental resources trying to find the quotation mark key.
We can write at the speed of thought.”
Read the entire piece here.
creative commons licensed (BY) flickr photo by Jason A. Howie: http://flickr.com/photos/jasonahowie/7910370882
From TeachThought:
“What exactly makes an app “essential” is open to interpretation. For pure productivity, you could consider the direction of Google Drive, Skype, Zoom Notes, iAnnotate–maybe a gradebook app, Class Dojo, etc.
But what if your classroom if is full of open-ended projects and you need to constantly communicate with students, parents, and the community? Google+, Google Hangouts, Remind, DIY, and maybe Trello?
College-prepping seniors in high school? Need apps for struggling readers in elementary? It just depends.” Read the entire piece and check out the 64 Apps over at TeachThought, click here.
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Here are a couple of upcoming MOOCs from MOOC-Ed:
“Fraction Foundations (January 26 – March 22)
This eight-week course will help you teach fractions concepts and skills more effectively by increasing your understanding of students’ thinking and implementing research-based approaches in the classroom. Designed for elementary teachers, math coaches and teacher educators, this course will address rigorous curriculum standards for fractions, whether from the Common Core State Standards or from other up-to-date standards.
creative commons licensed (BY-NC-SA) flickr photo by Edgar Barany: http://flickr.com/photos/edgarbarany/3248630063
English teacher Brian Sztabnik wrote an Excellent Edutopia piece on ways to engage students at the beginning and end of classes.
Eight minutes that matter most and eight ways to make them great:
“If we fail to engage students at the start, we may never get them back. If we don’t know the end result, we risk moving haphazardly from one activity to the next. Every moment in a lesson plan should tell.
The eight minutes that matter most are the beginning and endings. If a lesson does not start off strong by activating prior knowledge, creating anticipation, or establishing goals, student interest wanes, and you have to do some heavy lifting to get them back. If it fails to check for understanding, you will never know if the lesson’s goal was attained.” Read the entire piece here.
Photo Credit: hine via Compfight cc
In this Educational Leadership piece, authors Lee Shumow and Jennifer A. Schmidt write about the importance of making science relevant for students. They provide four strategies for helping students see the value of learning science.
A hush fell over the trigonometry class, heads swiveled around, and my classmates stared at me (Lee), dumbfounded. A few told me later they couldn’t believe I’d had the nerve to ask the teacher, with some exasperation, to explain the purpose of the function he was teaching. But I simply couldn’t imagine the purpose of the abstract and tedious work we were expected to do, and I wasn’t interested in doing a set of problems just for the sake of doing them. Luckily, I had an experienced teacher who provided several concrete examples that illustrated how very useful the function was in the real world. The reassurance that this was actually useful satisfied me, so I did the problems without complaint. All these years later, I still remember the respect I gained for both him and the value of trigonometry.” Read the entire piece here.
Stanford Math Professor Jo Boaler recently updated her resource site, where you can find recommended math apps, math videos, and research articles.
The above 2 minute video is by Kathy Schrock. (You can see a longer version of her presentation here.)
Infographics are an excellent tool for educators to use with students for a variety of purposes.
From the New York Times Learning Network, teacher Diana Laufenberg writes:
“In the history classroom we are always developing visual literacy. Between analyzing primary source documents like photographs, paintings and advertisements, and interacting with charts and graphs, we constantly ask students to understand the ways images communicate.
Infographics work in the classroom because they grab students and allow an entry point to learning — and because they sum up pages and pages, even chapters, of information that would take a reader hours to process.” Read more here.
Three sources for creating infographics:
1. piktochart
2. infogr.am
3. visual.ly
Resources for the @AAS-Sofia Learning Community 