Curating resources & sharing stories to empower teacher & student ownership, wonder, and daring.
Thanks to 21st century resources, long-gone are the days when teachers had to wait around for admin-organized professional development and growing opportunities. And becoming a real leader in the education world is simpler than you might think. Here are 3 ways you can make a big difference without carving out too much of your limited time!
Continue reading “3 Simple #EdLeadership Opportunities with Big Impact”
We don’t know about you, but we’re pretty visual folks over here. So here are some of the most important aspects we’ve learned about 21st century teaching over the past year of blogging, condensed into infographic form! Enjoy!
For more like this, check out our article on becoming a 21st Century teacher!
“You’ll use this all the time when you grow up.” “You’re developing skills you’ll need all the way through college.” “Someday, you’ll be so glad you learned another language.”
[insert eye-rolling here].
Even if true, relying primarily on these kinds of future-tense phrases to justify learning may have harmful effects. Nothing is worth draining our children’s inborn sense of discovery and enthusiasm.
The counterintuitive reality: instilling learning passion for the future only happens when we show students how to love learning today!
Think back to your classes that most sparked your passion. Chances are, those instructors made relevance a daily priority–a skill that takes purpose and deliberate planning. In our experience, that purpose and planning must consist of the following:
Students must be enabled to tailor their learning in order to find relevance. Technological options for making this happen are almost endless–but possibilities outside the high-tech box abound, too, including project based learning, genius hour, and other innovative new strategies.
Start the video below at 16 minutes for a wonderful anecdote by Sir Ken Robinson:
Anwar Masood highlights the importance & depth of the teacher-student relationship #teaching http://t.co/A2rjcd1G99 pic.twitter.com/A91opWEPQl
— Annet Kil (@AnnetKil) December 7, 2014
My first year teaching overflowed with the kinds of typical pursuits designed to prepare students for the future demands: book reports, math homework worksheets, and daily “independent study,” during which students would work for an hour on grammar, comprehension, vocabulary, and spelling. And guess where the most frequent strain on behavior occurred?
Over the years, we gradually replaced such activities with approaches that foster now learning–and I witnessed transformations in my students’ motivation, vibrance, and willingness to take risks.
How much of your student’s day involves learning for the present? Look below at tips for each part of my fifth grader’s schedule:
Photo Credit:
Welcome back to HGU for a fresh year! We hope you enjoyed a restful and relaxing holiday break, and that you are feeling rejuvenated for school. Here to offer some inspiration for your classroom New Year’s resolution-making are a few of our readers’ favorite posts in 2014, along with some suggestions for low-stress, high-impact goals.
If you are currently researching language arts programs, you won’t want to miss this teacher-tested review!
#3: 10 Read Alouds for Upper Elementary GradesResearch continues to back up the fact that reading to your children–even older children–provides literacy benefits. So don’t skimp on read-aloud time just because you teach preteens!
Several members of our HGU team tried out and reviewed Fluenz, Pimsleur, and Rosetta Stone to help give some guidance in choosing a foreign language program.
30 different math, science, and art games–all free, student-tested, and teacher-screened!
With the abundance of free professional development opportunities online, there’s no reason not to start taking your PD into your own hands in 2015! What we especially like about Google Courses for Educators is that they help teachers fully harness Google resources in the classroom, broken down into bite-sized 5-30 minute lessons.
*Create a Donors Choose project:Math board games, a document camera, 2 iPad Mini’s–these are just a few items I received through the generous donors on Donors Choose over the past few years. Be sure to watch for match offers or Chevron’s Fuel Your School to increase your chances of funding!
Cut up card stock and reserve just a couple minutes of your prep time each day to write a couple of meaningful letters to students each day. Express your admiration for their perseverance, confidence in their potential, and enthusiasm for their progress. Not only will you foster a positive class atmosphere, but you’ll help beat out the gray midwinter blues to which so many of us are susceptible.
Instead of getting overwhelmed by the many choices for technology integration in the classroom, choose just one this year. Student blogging, Twitter, flipped classrooms, and virtual field trips are a few of our favorites.
Photo Credit:
Featured Image (visible on mobile layout only this version): BazaarBizarreSF vis Flickr
Have you ever felt parent teacher conferences become a blur of shallow compliments and trite suggestions? Have you ever worried about the quality of students’ involvement? Do you want parents to gain more meaningful insight on how their children spend 7 hours a day, 5 days a week? Then consider shifting to student led conferences!
After a couple years of traditional parent teacher conferences, I began to doubt their value. Attendance was patchy, and the bulk of meetings that did take place often felt inconsequential. Given the vast expenditure of time and energy in preparations, conferences generally seemed to yield trivial returns–goals quickly forgotten, behavior largely unchanged, and work samples simply discarded. All that changed when my school introduced student-led conferences.
Note that this is geared toward upper-elementary. However, it can easily be adapted for younger and older students–our entire school adopted student-led conferences.
Give a labeled folder to each student to keep conference materials organized.
After each conference, I surveyed parents and students. Below is some of the feedback I frequently received.
Students loved:
Parents loved:
Featured Image: Claire Burge
No one likes dedicating time to an unproductive, thankless task–especially if you’re a teacher maintaining a class blog that no one checks! Here are 10 of our time-tested strategies to improve your blog, and to encourage your students and parents to visit.
Some teachers see this word and want to run for the hills–after all, the list of educational strategies with this recommendation could probably stretch for miles. However, the good news is that this doesn’t have to be a time-intensive commitment when you employ one or more of the following tips:
Add a tag or two to each post to help students and parents easily navigate your archives. Be sure to remember to add the tag widget to your sidebar as well!
Students of every age love seeing their pictures, and parents love seeing their kids in action at school! The result: an effective way to draw in your audience. This is where your platform’s app may come in handy as well so you can post directly from the device with which you took pictures. Of course, you may find you’d prefer to microblog your pictures using Twitter, but you can always also add a Photo Gallery section to your blog for students to explore. For posts with pictures, remember to add a “pictures” tag!
Not only does this get students excited about the concept of blogging in general, but if you put links to each of their blogs on your homepage sidebar, they will have an added incentive to visit. Get started using our practical (and teacher-tested) guide to student blogging!
Creating a few drop-down menus of organized student and parent resources is a fantastic way to increase your blog’s usefulness and traffic! If you’re an elementary school teacher, you can make one page for each subject area that’s packed with links to relevant games and tools. However, be sure to screen every link, both for safety and for quality–even young students are tech-savvy enough to see through an arbitrary list of “games” that aren’t actually fun! Check out our list of student favorites!
It may take a few months before your class blog catches on with a regular traffic flow. Just keep looking for ways to make it as useful as possible for your students, soliciting their ideas to find out what resources would help them!
Ask yourself: do YOU enjoy looking at busy web pages with patterned wallpapers of dogs or bright bubbles that make the words difficult to discern? Keep the colors solid behind all words, and play with fonts, sizes, and text colors to ensure easy reading.
If you have a class Twitter account or hashtag, make sure you add a widget to your sidebar that projects that Twitter feed (see our post on unlocking Twitter’s classroom potential). Also, ask students whether they’d be interested in seeing RSS feeds from sources such as TIME’s picture of the week, NASA’s image of the day, daily science news, or even a daily comic strip.
In all the back-to-school paperwork, be sure to promote your class blog link as much as possible! Let parents know the link is in your email signature, and remind them as necessary throughout the year!
A fun way to encourage visitors is to periodically throw in an incentive. Give students a “Secret code word” in your post every now and then, telling them to write it on a slip of paper and to covertly hand it in the next day for a treat or bonus.
Photo Credit
niXerKG (featured image)
Whether you are looking for games to add to your class blog or to your class computer bookmarks menu, we have compiled ranked lists based on games most visited and praised by 5th graders over several years! All the games are free and kid tested. Be sure to check out other ways to improve your classroom blog here! (All links last checked for safety and functionality on July 29, 2016).