Social annotation is becoming increasingly popular as it is an effective tool that achieves great results. As we know, traditional classroom practices emphasized student's individual learning, but social annotation encourages our students’ participation in a more supportive community of learners.
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Rubrics for PBL projects have the power to communicate, inspire, and motivate your students’ performance when they are working on PBL projects. Learn tips, techniques, and strategies to empower your rubrics to empower your students when they are creating PBL projects for your summative assessments.
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Engaging students in our instruction, their learning, as well as their assessments is a high priority for every teacher at every grade level with every student. And we find that our methodologies to engage students that work with one group of students, may be different from one class to the next.
Most times we think about the content of our instruction, student learning, and assessment, and if our students will deem it interesting enough to want to engage and do well.
However, I have found when teaching in my classroom as well as co-teaching and coaching in teachers’ classrooms that if we appeal to the human nature in each student, we have a higher probability to for most if not all students to WANT to engage in our classroom, course, and our content.
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Personalized Learning is more than a buzz phrase in education. It’s a powerhouse type of instructional and learning model that designs and delivers with each student in your classroom mind.
Furthermore, to give personalized learning even more power per ounce, we, teachers, found after virtual learning, that personalized learning really does set students up for higher achievement in their education.
Read about different strategies and approaches to planning, designing, and creating personalized learning pathways along with how you can group students and then personalize even more inside of each personalized learning path.
One of the clever ways teachers are getting their students’ attention is by integrating the Alexa™ Artificial Intelligence (AI) inside of their instruction, student learning, assessment, and even classroom management and classroom routines. Teachers have become experts overnight using Alexa™ AI in ways that make it feel like they have a virtual teaching assistant inside the classroom right along with them, helping with instructions, lesson parts, classroom management, motivation, and incentives. Read to find 10 BEST Quick Tips to begin integrating the Alexa AI in your classroom to engage students!
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Encouraging and inspiring students to be their own media creators is a strong and important move into getting our students to feeling empowered in our media-laden society. Giving students a VOICE in different forms makes an impact in the 21st century classroom as well as on their excitement, motivation, and confidence. Learn how to assign podcast assessments to empower your students with this 21st century type of media.
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Before the March 2020 Pandemic school closings across not only the nation, but the world, plagiarism was one of those occurrences that happened in our classroom that we as teachers wanted to squash. The internet and the easy “copy and paste” makes plagiarism prevalent and problematic in our secondary education classrooms.
However, since the Pandemic school closings gave our students lots of freedom when completing assignments, they didn’t experience before in their education unless they have been home on a medical sick leave, plagiarism, unfortunately, has become a more normal occurrence in our student writing assignment submissions now that we are back in school. Learn how to create an Intellectual Property Respect Culture in your classroom.
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In this post, I’ll give you some tips and tricks that will make your self-chosen and initiated EdTech PD in your career something you look forward to, and gets you excited as well as those higher teacher evaluation scores!
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If you were teaching BEFORE March 2020, you can easily compare what you knew about and did with EdTech with what you know about EdTech now. Whew! What a tailspin!
With all these changes, teachers should make EdTech professional development part of their career plan. EdTech PD is so important for teachers to participate and succeed in since, I do believe, our delivery, design, media, and scope of our instruction, student learning, and assessment HAS changed forever moving forward.
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We can, in our classroom, make this a customary practice and develop a conscientiousness in our students about copyright, intellectual property, and checking licenses of media to make sure we can use them in our instruction, student learning, and their assessment.
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At the beginning of the year, it never fails. The first question teachers ask me or email me is how to get around the school district’s content filter to access YouTube instructional videos for instruction and student learning. Having access to all websites without a school district’s content filter in place is one of the things we miss as teachers.
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On both my blog and podcast, I write and speak about student engagement in the classroom. The reason why I put so much emphasis into student engagement? I have found, in my eighteen years in the classroom either as a middle school or high school educator, or an educational technology instructional coach the past five years, if students are engaged in our instruction and their student learning activities, and assessments, student performance rises. It’s almost a given.
When I observe a student immersed in a classroom activity, the student chose to place the student’s attention, focus, and activity inside the learning instance. And what usually happens as a result? The student either achieves a high score or a higher score compared to a learning instance where the student did not appear to be engaged in the learning episode.
Why is student engagement the powerhouse of student success in our classrooms?
In my recent blog posts, I talked a lot about what engages our students in our classrooms. You learned that community, technology, instructor presence, and more are real game-changers when it comes to engaging our students from the start of our lessons to the end. But in today’s blog post, I’m going to talk about what prevents student engagement from happening if it’s not included in your classroom.
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Whether you are a teacher who uses a lot of technology in the classroom, or one who uses a small amount of technology in the classroom, I believe we can all agree, technology in our classrooms is here to stay, especially since the situation we all found ourselves in March 2020 when everything we did in our classroom had to turn digital to reach our students. Let's go over today five of the main reasons why media has the power to empower our students’ learning and their education in ways no other elements give it any competition.
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As teachers, we participate in many professional development sessions about instruction, student learning, and assessment. In our college courses, we learned about instructional strategies, assessment approaches, and classroom management.
I believe it is safe to say, that professional development around the topic of instructor presence may be small if not for some teachers, non-existent. In this post, I’m going to share with you the power instructor presence has on student engagement and strategies you can use to capitalize on that positive energy in your classroom
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In my 18 years in education as both a computer science teacher and educational technology instructional coach, I have seen patterns of powerful influencers that have a tremendous positive impact on encouraging student engagement.
My framework, The ENGAGE Framework, is based on the human nature of your students. True student engagement is not based on a student’s IQ, interests, socio-economic level, or gender. It all really comes down to what influencers help engage a human being. And it’s more like, what influencers impact the decision to engage or not to engage.
The influencer I’m going to write about today is Community.
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We read and hear a lot about concerns that due to students learning from home, being away from school, teachers, friends, and extra-curricular activities, and not having what used to be the normal and familiar routine of going to school, there may be gaps in their learning and development.
If we want to give the same kind of support to all our students, how can we help them close their gaps over the summer break?
Before we begin with nine strategies to support our students over the summer break, let’s define what a “gap” could look like in a student’s 2020-2021 school year education.
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Finals are right around the corner. What should your final look like to gauge your student’s learning at the school year end that keeps in mind social-emotional wellness and fairness to our students in these unique times?
I believe until we are back in the physical classroom, the way finals used to look, especially at the high school level, should be put in the drawer for now. In light of an extremely dynamic school year with virtual learning at home, a U.S. Presidential election like no other, horrific happenings throughout our nation, almost on a daily basis, the pandemic woes, vaccination updates, social unrest, and racial concerns, our students have lived through a lot this school year, and still needed to do school at home.
And, add what’s going on at home, and our students have a lot on their mental and emotional plate.
In this post, I will provide your five strategies to give your finals a 20-21 SY facelift to, 1) give you a final that measures students’ knowledge and understanding, 2) makes students feel the final is not a big task, and 3) to increase the probability your students will complete it, complete it with effort, and submit it for credit.
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So, how do teachers get students to turn on their cameras? I have put together 30 ways teachers can encourage students to turn on their cameras during live virtual classes. Some of these ways are going to make students feel good, like that handshake at the door. Other ways will be linked to our content. And the ways that are left are going to create fun in the classroom, which is an important influencer to getting students to engage.
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Feedback…what does it mean to provide meaningful and purposeful feedback to students? Quickly, I can tell you what it’s not. Feedback should not be solely communication with the student to tell him or her how he or she did on an assignment after it is submitted. Yes, you heard me right. And, if you are doing this type of limited feedback, no worries, I, too, did the same for years.
And then I heard a presentation at a live ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) Conference about feedback and providing the type of feedback to students that increase their FUTURE student engagement, learning, progress, achievement, and confidence. You saw that right…FUTURE!
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