Tag Archive for: teaching

Learning logs were a core part of my classroom practice, having seen the effects they have on improving student performance in the bilingual schools of New Brunswick in my first year of teaching. A student there would write down what they had learnt and what they felt they'd have to learn tomorrow in order to achieve the goals of the project they had set out on. In paper format they were quite tricky to manage, and as students peer-assessed there would be paper flying all over the place.

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Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim reminds us that education "statistics" have names: Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, whose stories make up the engrossing foundation of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN. As he follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, Guggenheim undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying "drop-out factories" and "academic sinkholes," methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems.

AN amazing list relevant to  "every teacher no matter what grade level or subject".
It includes tools for file sharing, photo and video editing, networking and software just to list a few.
Check it out at http://bit.ly/cdfzSe

A Sports for the Mind class. Instead of grades, students receive report cards with levels of expertise like ‘‘novice’’ and ‘‘master.’’

One morning last winter I watched a middle-school teacher named Al Doyle give a lesson, though not your typical lesson. This was New York City, a noncharter public school in an old building on a nondescript street near Gramercy Park, inside an ordinary room that looked a lot like all the other rooms around it, with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors and steam-driven radiators that hissed and clanked endlessly.
Doyle was, at 54, a veteran teacher and had logged 32 years in schools all over Manhattan, where he primarily taught art and computer graphics. In the school, which was called Quest to Learn, he was teaching a class, Sports for the Mind, which every student attended three times a week. It was described in a jargony flourish on the school’s Web site as “a primary space of practice attuned to new media literacies, which are multimodal and multicultural, operating as they do within specific contexts for specific purposes.” What it was, really, was a class in technology and game design.

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In this global marketplace, kids need to learn the proper skills and gain hands-on, real-world experience if they hope to survive the workforce. If teachers mix career-oriented projects into their classrooms, they will help students master core subjects and learn skills including communication, problem solving, critical thinking, global awareness, financial literacy and technology.

http://bit.ly/dDzx9k

As students enter the classroom this year they will be met with a host of new technological teaching tools, including the Smart Board and the Mimio. This is the first year that the Newington Public Schools has incorporated “Smart Boards” in every classroom in the school district. “We have been chipping away at this over the last six years,” said Superintendent Dr. William Collins, adding he was excited to see the technology in place.
“The technology is what engages [the students],” he said.

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The Kids That Rip! Skateboarding School in Mesa, Ariz., is using Suzanne Selfors’s novel Smells Like Dog (Little, Brown, May) as the basis for its curriculum throughout the 2010-2011 school year. In addition to camps and skateboarding classes, the school is the first in the U.S. to offer a full-time academic and skateboard training program for a handful of students. The students’ lessons will tie in to chapters in the book (they have made their own compasses, studied Homer’s Odyssey, and visited a goat farm), and Selfors plans to visit the school at the end of the academic year. Here, a group of third-grade students visit with a basset hound from the Arizona Basset Hound Rescue.

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With another long hot American summer coming to a close, many students are scrambling to get back into “learning mode” before school starts. One of the simplest ways to ease that transition is with podcasts. Whether your passion is American History or Algebra, there’s probably an educational podcast out there for you.
While these programs probably won’t mirror your lesson plan, they will explore topics covered in class. Below is a sampling of some of the exceptional podcasts that both teach and entertain. Best of all – they’re free. Read on for your “2010 Downloading Curriculum.”

Here is the list => http://bit.ly/cp8bZ2

From Pivotal Public Speaking

Public Speaking tip – Watch your language

From Pivotal Personal Best

Review of Great Taste no Pain

From WRB

Study: E-books take longer to read than print

From Pivotal  Kids books

Free online reading tools for kids

From Pivotal Teachers

Quote for the Day about teachers and teaching