I had a brief conversation with a 12 year old boy this month that went as follows: TEACHER: “WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE SUBJECT?” STUDENT: “ART” TEACHER: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN ART?” STUDENT: “MAKING CLAY ANIMALS” TEACHER: “WHY ARE YOU MAKING CLAY ANIMALS?” STUDENT: “I DON’T KNOW, IT’S LIKE A MATH TEST. THE TEACHERS GIVE YOU THIS…
From a financial perspective, Twitter’s narrative has been relatively straightforward since it went public in 2013. The company has always struggled with user growth. It couldn’t — and never likely will — grow at the pace or to the magnitude of Facebook, Snapchat, or WhatsApp. But Twitter has in the past been capable of growing…
This is part 3 of 13 things to do before the first day of school. For your students, take the guesswork out of finding your class online by designating your classroom’s default home page. This should be the main site for your classroom to post news, links, assignments, etc. It helps the students know that…
I used to have beautiful handwriting. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, when it was assumed writing in cursive was a necessary skill, I actually practiced my letters, trying out different capital “Gs” and inventing fancy swirls to go under my signature. If I ever needed to leave a mysterious letter in an old…
Source: Codevolve Codevolve is a website designed to interactively teach programming. The interface looks a lot like codecademy.com, but Codevolve puts the emphasis on learning skills, not badges. Another nice feature is Storyboard, where you can create your own assignments.
This is part 2 of 13 things to do before the first day of school A Google Voice number is a great way to communicate with parents, without having to give out your personal home or cellphone number. With a Google Voice, you control what phones ring when the number is called, when phones will…
Showbie is a free educational app for teachers and students that makes creating and completing assignments, providing assessments, and storing grades easy. Source: Showbie – The Heart of Your Paperless Classroom If you are in an iPad classroom, Showbie may be a site you’ll want to check out. As a teacher, you can assign tasks…
At its core, Dropbox is a service for storing and sharing files on the cloud. If you’re one of its 200 million users, this is probably what you mostly use Dropbox for, too. But there’s a lot more that Dropbox offers to make your life easier. Some of Dropbox’s underused features include commenting on files,…
This is part 1 of 13 things to do before the first day of school For a lot of scenarios, creating a Google Form to collect information works well. But it could also be overkill to create a form just to collect a student’s username from a web service, or to have a student select…
Get kids programming within minutes. Source: Lightbot Lightbot is a series of challenges for students to learn programming, much like Swift Playgrounds or All Can Code. These activities are broken up into two categories, one for students ages 4-8 and the other for students ages 9+. The activites can be completed on iOS, Android, or…