10 Projects and Templates to Up Your Google Slides Game One of Google Drive’s most versatile and powerful tools, Slides, has so much potential for the classroom. Read on for templates, hacks, and project ideas to start using today! I use a paper size of 8.5″ x 11″ in Google Drawings, but didn’t realize I…
So You Want to Drive Instruction With Digital Badges? Start With the Teachers While badging for students shows real promise, a partnership between the Houston Independent School District (HISD) and VIF International Education demonstrates that in the short run the best approach to scaling digital badging is not to focus on students, but on their teachers….
10 engaging Google Drawings activities for classes | Ditch That Textbook Google Drawings is like a digital poster board. Or sheet of paper. Or a blank slate waiting for your great ideas. Sadly, many educators don’t know about it or know what it does. Maybe part of the reason: when you click “new” in your…
Ten Reasons New Teachers Aren’t Using Technology Last week, I met with a group of twenty-four candidates for our Masters in Arts of Teaching program. I loved the excitement in the room and the idealism of the group. They wanted to change the world. And they will. However, I noticed a certain pessimism when it…
How To Give Students Specific Feedback That Actually Helps Them Learn To tell a student “great job”or “this needs work” is a missed opportunity. Everyone loves to hear they did a great job. And perhaps your student really did nail this latest assignment. But the problem with “great job” is this: it’s not specific. There…
Who Is Responsible for Tech Abuse? For as long as there has been social media, kids have been getting punished for its “misuse” (in the eyes of adults). Because of this perceived inappropriate behavior in social media, many schools have blocked Facebook, Twitter, and other frequently-used social media sites from their students. Smart phones are…
Using Sound of Text site for language learning Sound of Text allows you to enter up to 100 characters of text in one of 44 languages. Once you click Submit, the site generates audio of the word or phrase. I have used Google Translate on my phone in the past to communicate with an ELL…
Here Is An Excellent Google Drive Tool for Creating Rubrics OrangeSlice:Teacher Rubric is an interesting Google Docs add-on to use for creating rubric selections and converting the Analysis or Holistic rubric into a percentage or points grade. Any tool that can provide students with feedback quickly is a good tool to use.
On Slow Readers and What It Means for Student Reading Identity I am ready to hang a banner in our classroom to loudly display the following words, “Being a slow reader does not make you a bad reader!” and then point to it every time a child tells me with a downward glance that they…
Older beats younger when it comes to correcting mistakes Findings from a new study challenge the notion that older adults always lag behind their younger counterparts when it comes to learning new things. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that older adults were actually better than…