But giving my students choice and allowing them to being curious learners was hard work. In fact, sometimes I was still really ineffective at guiding the learning that was taking place in my classroom. I tried many different project-based learning frameworks, embraced the inquiry cycle, and tweaked my own idea of how to structure this…
This book reaffirms what I have speculated for a while; the majority of schools and districts gauge the effectiveness of professional development with nothing more than teacher surveys. As Guskey informs the reader, “Sadly, the bulk of professional development today is evaluated only at Level 1 [participant reaction], if at all. Of the rest, the…
Synergyse is a company that offers Google Apps training for the various Google Apps products. This training is delivered in the form of videos or in browser tutorials. While this has been a paid product, Google has purchased the company allowing anyone to use the training for free. To try it out, head over to…
Imagine you are 3 or 4 feet tall, a meter — give or take 10 cm — and you climb off this huge yellow bus (the vehicle that teaches you that seat belts are not important), or you climb out of mom or dad’s car, and — you are at your school. Imagine you are 16 or 17, frustrated, tired, angry…
I want children to read literature that is conducive to their age and leave those mystical and frightening texts for when they can discern reality, and when they have first learned to love beauty. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of…
Yesterday Google released Spaces, a web and mobile app, designed to facilitate sharing in small groups. It’s not to be confused with another instant messaging client, but more along the lines of a way to share links, pictures, and videos with a small group of people. I installed the mobile app and took the web…
NComputing has launched the Chromebook CX110 and Chrome app, giving U.S. schools the ability to easily run Windows applications on their Chromebooks.More than half of all computers used in U.S. K-12 schools are Chromebooks, and now NComputing Chromebooks – with the vSpace client – provides easy, multi-user access to the Windows, Java or Silverlight applications…
Small children are simply AMAZING. They have talents, ideas, worries, humor, and are full of questions. They are busy little people with their own hopes and dreams that are untainted by the demands and reality of our world. They don’t know about the pressures to “fit in”, or to not be as intelligent as the…
Google Photos is a great place to store your school photos, especially if you are a Google Apps for Education school since you will have unlimited space for those photos. Your photos can be used in Google Drive documents, but a lot of teachers like to create slideshows of their photos. Google doesn’t offer a…
Only 16 percent of teachers in a recent survey give their schools an ‘A’ for incorporating technology into their classroom, and 48 percent of all surveyed teachers consider the technology they do have to be outdated.Teachers’ Dream Classroom Survey, sponsored by Edgenuity, reveals that of teachers who did give their schools an ‘A’ for classroom…